


Chì Mi Na Mòrbheanna

by Torchbarer



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: (I mean. it gives me Lots Of Sandpit To Play In), (and Aulea has plenty of time to Meddle), ALL OF THOSE ARE AULEA, Aromantic Asexual Character, Aromantic Character, Asexual Character, Autistic Character, Gen, Regis Is Bad At Names, SI OC - Freeform, in an era of the timeline that we don't know much about, my first fic in this fandom is an SI OC, new characters and tags will be added as they become relevent, since I AM writing in an era before most of the canon characters have been born, the OCs became more relevant than anticipated and I don't know why I didn't expect that, this is just self-indulgence guys. I am being so self-indulgent, what could possibly go wrong
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-19
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2020-01-16 05:13:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 21,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18514612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Torchbarer/pseuds/Torchbarer
Summary: For a moment, she thinks her entire brain shuts down. Reality freezes as she slowly but steadily processes the reality of the photograph on the front page of the newspaper in front of her. The photograph of the King and the Crown Prince. The Crown Prince, Regis Lucis Caelum, who, she is realising in a way that feels a lot like watching a train crash, is a dead ringer for the best friend she’s been sneaking off into the forest to meet up with for years now.Because,her mind charges on, heedless of her desires tostop realising this right now please,they’re the same person.There’s a lot of things to unpack in the realisation that her Nightlight is Regis and she’ll get to them in time, likely in the middle of the night while staring at the ceiling, but for now, there’s just one thought running through her head:Oh no,she thinks, almost dizzy,Iamthat Aulea.Or: an SI-OC Aulea fic because go big or go home, right?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Y'know what happens when you reread [Dreaming of Sunshine](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/7347955/1/Dreaming-of-Sunshine) for the hundredth time? You wanna write a self-insert, that's what happens.  
> Y'know what happens when you read [charlottedabookworm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CharlotteDaBookworm/pseuds/CharlotteDaBookworm) and [sparklemoose's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sparklemoose) FFXV self-inserts while DoS already has you wanting to write a self-insert? You wanna take a crack at a FFXV self-insert, that's what happens.
> 
> Okay, strictly speaking, as is briefly there in the tags, this is actually an SI OC fic. So it's not _strictly_ a self-insert as in "this is me" but I did base her _heavily_ off of me (I'm a Christian irl and I didn't want to deal with the headache of trying to figure out how to make that theology mesh with the accepted reincarnation reality of SIs so I made a character who is Basically Me But With A Central Part Of My Identity Removed)
> 
> Honestly, I'm just having fun with this, and I hope you have fun too!

If there is one thing that the staff of Solum House can all agree on, it’s that the young mistress is something of an odd duck.

It’s a title bestowed with the utmost fondness, of course. None of them hold any ill will towards the girl – they would be hard pressed to. She is kind and courteous and always looking for, if not a way to help, any way to avoid making their jobs harder. Her curiosity is boundless and eager, her enthusiasm infectious, her laughter bright. For all that she seems to still be figuring out how exactly _tact_ works, she often seems to carry a humility beyond her years. The worst any of them could really say of her is that she likes to talk a bit _too_ much and is not particularly skilled at telling when a conversational partner really needs to return to their work, no matter how fascinating the nesting habits of cockatrice are.

Compared to the horror stories heard from friends and friends-of-friends, stories of entitlement and tantrums and astonishing pride, a child a tad too eager for their company is nothing any of them are going to complain about.

She’s a good kid, they all more-or-less agree. A good kid but an odd duck.

It’s little things, really. Little things which all add up.

She’s been fiercely independent since before she could walk, if one takes the word of those who have worked for the family since her infancy and before. Always determined to do things on her own, to figure out the solution to every problem, asking for help only when a task proves truly beyond her. The kitchen staff have a story, walking the edge between humour and horror, of the day she decided, at four years old, that she preferred soup blended and vanished from the table during lunch, only to be found in the kitchen attempting to work the blender on her own. The groundskeeper has many about finding her exploring the garden, scratched up and muddy and absolutely certain that she isn’t stuck up a tree, right until the moment she can’t get herself down. And, of course, they all know young Amelia Curantis’ favourite story, of finding a three-year-old lying on her stomach in her father’s study, contentedly kicking her legs in the air as she worked her way through a children’s reading book, and the shock that she felt when she realised the child was actually _reading_ it and not simply looking at the pictures.

And yet, for all that independence, she seems to crave the approval of all those around her.  Not a day goes by where she doesn’t approach at least one of them, bearing some new factoid gleaned from the contents of the bookshelves that line the halls or with an offer of help with even the most menial of tasks. There is no disguising the way her whole being lights up when a word of praise is sent her way, the way she thrives at almost any task near as soon as the words _well done_ are said in her direction.

Alongside that youthful eagerness to please, however, is an age behind her eyes. Not the precocious kind, where she speaks with words years above her – though she does that one too, stumbling over the pronunciations in the way of one who has only ever read a word – but the kind where it sits bone deep, the kind that makes old Ms Candida Aspectus the Housekeeper cluck her tongue and call her _an old soul,_ though only when the child is guaranteed not to hear.

And for all of that, all her love of learning and love of sharing what she learns, her eagerness to please and her vivaciousness in darting from task to task, there are days where just goes _quiet._ Where the light behind her eyes dims and that odd age shows through, where she walks the halls of the house as silently as a ghost, alternating between avoiding every reflective surface and staring into them like she doesn’t recognise her own face.

She’s prone to bouts of unexplained crying on those days. Admittedly, she’s prone to bouts of unexplained crying on any day, but on quiet days the likelihood seems to increase exponentially. Sometimes, it is set off by the simplest, smallest things – a new meal that the cook is trying (accompanied always by assurances that _it’s good, it is, it’s really good, I’m not sad_ despite still wet glimmering on her cheeks) or the feeling of new fabrics, the scent of certain flowers or the sound of a song drifting from a radio. There’s no pattern and no particular warning. Anything and everything seems able to prompt a sudden dissolving into tears and even the girl herself can’t seem to explain why it happens.

It happens more than they see, they all know. She never admits it but every last one of them has a story of a time that they found her hastily scrubbing her eyes dry, giving a watery, strained smile and attempting to deny it. None of them press her on it.

After all, she’s just a child. A child with a fierce hunger for knowledge and affection and affirmation, with no company but books and parents who may see to every material comfort but are barely present and staff who have duties to fulfil, not another child in sight.

Just one little girl, all alone in a big house named for loneliness.

So, yes, she’s an odd duck, but none of them will begrudge little Aulea her eccentricities.


	2. Chapter 2

Aulea Fax is three years old when she wakes up with grief in her heart and a scream on her lips.

She is, in fact, _exactly_ three years old, tearing into awareness just as the second hand ticks past the hour at seven minutes past four in the morning.

It happens in an instant. One moment, there is a toddler peacefully asleep in her bed, serene and content, not even dreaming. The next, her eyes fly open and her breath catches in her throat, her heart clenches and she barely manages to pull the quilt upwards in time to muffle the sound tearing out of her throat.

The warmth suddenly feels unbearable and she kicks the covers off, shuddering in relief as the cool air of a bedroom in winter hits her skin. She pulls her knees to her chest, hugging them as tightly as she can, and tries not to sob, her breathing wildly.

 _In for seven… hold for four… out for eight. There you go, darling, just follow me, you’re okay. In for seven…_ croons a familiar voice in the back of her head, one that she will never again hear outside of memories.

In for seven, hold for four, out for eight. She buries her face in her knees, repeats the count in her head. In for seven, hold for four, out for eight.

Twenty years’ worth of memories and knowledge and loved ones and _life_ settles into place behind her eyelids.

Aulea _breathes._

* * *

She isn’t sure quite how much time passes like that but the sun has risen and birds are singing by the time she uncurls herself.

She looks around the bedroom, which feels so familiar and yet so _not,_ and her heart aches but she also feels almost at peace. This space is _hers_ and it has been for three years now. There’s little signs of her all over it; a pile of rocks, collected out of the garden, sitting in pride of place on a toy box; crayon drawings of houses and grass and trees and sun and people only barely recognisable as such, stuck all over the walls; a pile of stuffed animals at the end of her bed, all strategically placed so that they won’t fall off in the night and so that they can weigh down her feet if she shuffles down the bed just enough.

She blinks through tears at that last one for a while, then slowly reaches to her side. Twenty years and three years sit side by side in her mind, slowly figuring out how they fit together, but there’s one thing that they firmly agree on: if she’s in a bed, there should be a source of comfort at her side.

Her fingers brush fabric and she glances down as she pulls the toy into her lap. It’s a stuffed coeurl, clearly well loved for all that it can’t be that old. It’s not that big and she thinks that if she were still a grown-up, she’d be able to wrap one hand around its whole body. It _shhff_ s softly as she moves it and flops in her hands, just like a beanbag toy _should._ The weight is familiar and comforting and while it’s not her Tiger, she’s pretty sure it’s as close as she’s ever going to get now. She has a sense that for the past three years, this toy has filled that role and filled it well.

 _His name is Coeurl_ , her mind supplies and she has to hold back a giggle.

It’s nice to know that she was still herself, even when she didn’t know she was.

* * *

Fumeus and Carere Fax are far from doting parents, a fact which Aulea finds herself guiltily grateful for. If they _were,_ they would surely notice the difference in their daughter. She does her best to act like nothing is different but _everything_ is and she’s never been a great actor.

 _You wear your heart on your sleeve, sweetheart_ says a voice in the back of her head. She’s not _quite_ so open anymore, which is a good thing, because she doesn’t want to wear a torn and shattered heart on her sleeve, no matter how much she’s pulling herself back together.

But Femeus and Carere are distant. They see to it that her material needs are taken care of and then they leave her to her own devices, seemingly with no thought as to her age. It’s something of a shock, coming from where she’d been before, but she finds herself all the more glad of it – not only does it mean that her... _situation_ is probably not going to get noticed but their behaviour makes it all the easier to think of them only as the distant _father_ and _mother._

(They’re not _dad_ and _mum_ and they never will be. Those names are long claimed, by ones who earned them more than these two ever have. She can accept many things in this new life but those two names are forever claimed)

Aulea’s pretty sure that some changes got picked up on by the household staff – and isn’t _that_ a trip to adjust to; her three years as Aulea Fax identify the situation as normal but the twenty from before say _what kind of posh nonsense is a house this size and **that** many people working in it?_ – but none of them seem suspicious of anything, so she’s pretty sure she’s doing okay.

It’s a strange situation and she spends a good few days existing in an almost haze of grief, somehow keeping anyone from picking up on it, and she starts to settle back into a role she hadn’t been consciously aware of before.

 _Act natural,_ she thinks, taking a moment to let herself giggle at the memories of tv shows and movies and comics where that phrase triggered behaviour that was the furthest thing from it, and then making herself take it seriously.

Act natural. Behave like a normal child. Adapt and fit in and be _patient_ before you start using skills you shouldn’t have yet.

Be patient. It’s not that hard. She can do it. She’s got this.

* * *

She makes it two days before she picks up a book.

* * *

The thing is, there’s _so much to learn._ The world around her is so, so different to anything she knew before, even if she is mostly limited to the confines of the house. There’s so much to learn and so many books in the house and so many times when nobody is looking at her. It’s probably not her best idea ever but she just doesn’t _care._ There are books and she needs to _read._

She starts with the picture books that are lying around, just to test if she still _can_ read. To her utmost delight, she _can_ (and she decides she’s not going to question the language, not if it means she can read) and she immediately upgrades herself to every book about the world she can reach on the bookshelves.

There’s so much wildlife to learn about, animals unlike anything she ever knew, though many of them carry a nagging familiarity. There’s plants, too, and countries, and history.

There’s also, she quickly discovers, _fiction._ New fiction, lining the shelves in equal numbers to the factual books, and she has never been able to resist the lure of a good story.

* * *

She makes it five months (and through two bookshelves) before anybody catches her.

It’s worth it.

* * *

Before she gets caught, though, she makes an important discovery.

* * *

She frowns at the copy of _Cosmogony_ sitting sequestered in the bookshelf. Something about the name tugs at her memory. It’s _familiar._

With a tug, the book comes free and she cracks it open. Her eyes fly over the words and something heavy starts to sit in her gut. The _words_ in this book are familiar.

_I know this story. I’ve read this before._

She brushes a hand over an illustration, closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and corrects herself.

_I’ve read this Before._

The realisation hits like an instant, like she already knew it and it was just waiting for the last point of connection to be made.

_Cosmogony. Insomnia. Lucis. Coeurls. **Eos.**_

The book drops out of her hands and she stumbles a few steps backwards. She _remembers_ those names, those words, those places and things. Remembers a video game and a movie and whole host of other things. Remembers a story.

Remembers a story that she had _loved._

She stumbles another few steps backwards, her back pressing up against the wall. Slowly, she sinks down until she’s sitting, head tilted up so she can press the back of her skull up against it. The pressure is nice, is calming.

The world that she’s living in had been a story and she had loved it. She remembers the fire under her skin as she had devoured all of the content she could get her hands on. How many playthroughs of the game had she sought out? How many times had she watched the movie?

She knows... so _much_ about this world. About things that are going to happen.

She needs to write it down.

She will. In a moment. For now she just... needs to think. Needs to process this.

Something else processes, another connection made, and her eyes fly open to stare at the ceiling.

 _Oh,_ she thinks, eyes glazing over slightly as she mindlessly traces the patterns of the cornicing _oh, I hope I’m not **that** Aulea._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aulea's surname is something of an inside joke with myself. _Fax_ in Latin means "torch" (amongst other things) which is what my real life surname means (amongst a couple of other things)
> 
> The names of all the ocs in this fic were pretty much all chosen to be meaningful/jokes so feel free to look up what any of them mean in Latin to share a chuckle with me (except Amelia's first name, which is Germanic, and got chosen bc it Just Sounded Right)


	3. Chapter 3

She stares at the roof for quite a while after that, mind somewhere far away. Then she blinks and all at once is right back firmly in her body. She scoops the copy of _Cosmogony_ into her arms and bolts down the hallway and up the stairs and down another hallway, only barely managing to not slam her door when she tumbles into her bedroom. The book is unceremoniously shoved under her pillow and she sits on the floor and _breathes._ In for seven, hold for four, out for eight. This is big. This is Big. This is not something she expected to deal with at all and definitely not at _three._ (Twenty? Twenty three? Three-and-twenty-and-neither?)

Getting reborn into the world of a video game is weird enough, for all that it most certainly seems to be her life now. Is she really going to have to deal with being the main character’s mother too? That seems like the worst possible outcome, if she’s supposed to be the Aulea that falls in love with King Regis and has Noctis, since those are two things that belong firmly on the list of _things she can’t do._ Falling in love just straight up isn’t possible for her – she knows that _that_ isn’t something that has changed even with a new body – and the thought of ever being pregnant – let alone what precedes that – makes her skin _crawl._ It’s never going to happen. That’s a firm _Nope._

If she’s supposed to be _that_ Aulea, then there’s every chance that whatever made her be _her_ , whatever preserved her memories (her soul?) across worlds, has doomed the world because the King of Light will never be born.

She really, _really_ hopes that she’s not that Aulea.

* * *

After that, the thought _nags_ at her. She tries to put it out of her mind and just go back to life as it was, before she realised where she is. She tries to go back to reading whatever she can get her hands on when nobody’s looking, tries to go back to pretending, the best that she can, that she’s a normal child. She tries as hard as she can and she just _can’t._ A glance out of the window leads to her seeing the Wall in the sky and she knows what it is and the price it costs. A turn of the page leads to an illustration of a daemon and she knows where they come from and what it’s going to take to stop them.

The copy of _Cosmogony_ is still in her room. Hidden at the bottom of a drawer underneath the clothes now, rather than her pillow.

She needs to know. She can’t move forward until she _knows_ , one way or the other.

* * *

Figuring out whether or not she’s That Aulea (a term which she has decided deserves capital letters) is not the easiest task. There was so little information about her Before that she has no idea where to start with looking for the signs of if she is or isn’t her. Ultimately, she decides that there are two things she needs to know to figure it out. She does know _one_ useful thing about That Aulea that can help, after all.

That Aulea had been Regis’s childhood friend. That had been one of the few concrete pieces of information about her, she remembers. Regis had married his _childhood friend_ Aulea.

Which means that, to determine whether or not she’s That Aulea, she needs to know if there’s any possibility at all of her somehow meeting the Crown Prince in a capacity that could lead to friendship and she needs to know if there are _any other_ Auleas who could potentially be That Aulea.

The questions she needs answers to are probably ones she’d be best asking of her parents. They’re the kinds of questions that children ask their parents all the time, even if she’s asking for vastly different reasons. Fumeus and Carere are the most likely ones to be able to tell her how likely it is that she’ll ever run into the royal family, since a meeting like that in childhood could _only_ be because of her parents. They’re also the most likely to be able to tell her if “Aulea” is just a normal name in this world or if they made it up themselves.

They really would be the best ones to ask.

They’re not the ones she’s going to ask.

Aulea does her utmost to stay out of Fumeus and Carere’s way. For all that they don’t pay much attention – and _oh_ , most days, she yearns to know why the two even had a child when they seem so content to _forget_ that they do; for all it makes it easier for her to not get caught, she knows what this would do to any other child – she still doesn’t want to take the risk of them noticing anything. It’s best if she doesn’t bother them, if she takes her need for affection and attention and her curiosity to others. It minimises the risk.

That still applies, even with _these_ questions.

She goes to Ms Candida instead.

Ms Candida is nice, always quick with a smile and free with her time. Aulea remembers that even from before she Remembered. She’s also worked in the house longer than Aulea’s been _alive_ (longer than she’s been alive as _Aulea,_ anyways, but she’s pretty sure that she’s worked there longer than the total time too) so she’s the most likely one to know, other than her parents, and she doesn’t blink twice at _anything._ She’ll be able to get a straightforward answer from her and probably won’t raise any suspicions in asking.

Also, she gives really good hugs and Aulea _really_ needs a hug right now.

“Ms Candida?” she asks, leaning around the edge of the doorway to lean into the library, Coeurl a comforting weight in her arms.

Cleaning the library is usually Amet’s job, Aulea knows, but Amet’s away right now so Ms Candida is doing it. The library is a big room but cleaning it doesn’t take that long since almost nobody uses it – except Aulea who is always very careful to put things back so that it isn’t obvious she was there – unless all the wood is due to be polished. _Then_ it takes quite a while.

The whole room smells of lemons and Ms Candida has a bottle of polish in one hand and a cloth in the other when she turns around but she smiles at Aulea anyways. She even crouches down so that they’re sort of at eye level.

“Yes, Aulea?” she replies.

“Can I ask a question?”

“Of course, dear. What is it?”

Aulea steps fully into the doorway and fiddles with one of Coeurl’s paws. She’s thought a lot about how to ask this question. It needs to sound like how a three year old would ask it, after all. She sucks her bottom lip between her teeth. She’s never been good at sounding her age, not even when she really was young. None of the ideas she has so far feel right but if she doesn’t just _ask_ then the needing to know will eat and eat away at her. She met enough young children the first time around to be able to approximate something; the key factors, she’s pretty sure, are being as unclear and confusing as possible. Three year olds usually don’t know enough about the world to ask questions in a way that makes _sense._

There’s an expression starting to form on Ms Candida’s face. Her brows are furrowing, a corner of her mouth starting to tilt down ever so slight, oh no, she’s been thinking about it for too long, that emotion is almost certainly concern, this is out of character behaviour, abort abort _abort-_

“Am I the only Aulea?” she blurts, hugging Coeurl closer on instinct, hoping the pressure will calm her heart before it gets a chance to really start racing.

Ms Candida tilts her head slightly. Aulea does that too, when she’s considering stuff. She’s always done it, even Before, but didn’t know anyone else back then who did. She wonders if Ms Candida does it for the same reason she does.

“You’re the only you that _I_ know,” Ms Candida says, a tone in her voice that Aulea tentatively identifies as _placating._

She pulls a face. This is what she gets for asking unclear questions. This is why she likes being precise.

“That’s not what I meant,” she mumbles, hunching her shoulders and tucking Coeurl’s head under her chin “I’m the only me but are there Auleas who aren’t me?”

Clarity ignites behind Ms Candida’s eyes.

“Are there other people who have the same name as you?” she asks.

Aulea nods.

“Oh yes, plenty,” Ms Candida says, also nodding. “It’s a pretty name and lots of parents other than yours choose it,”

Aulea’s shoulders _slump_ , a line of tension that’s been present since she read _Cosmogony_ loosening in an instant. _There are other Auleas._ That alone reduces the likelihood that she’s That One. That’s good to know. That’s _really_ good to know.

Ms Candida smiles. Aulea’s not sure what meaning she’s taken from the blatant show of relief, if she’s even recognised it as relief, but for once she doesn’t really mind not knowing.

She should go now. She’s got the answer to one of the two burning questions. The other can be asked another day.

Her legs don’t move.

Ms Candida apparently thought that that would be the end of it as much as Aulea did. She tilts her head to the side again.

“Another question?” she asks.

“Your job is helping clean things and telling Amet and Castus and Amelia what to do,” Aulea says, which isn’t a question.

Ms Candida hums an affirmative. Aulea sucks her cheeks between her teeth for a moment, trying to think of an age-appropriate way to ask her next question.

“What’s Mother and Father’s jobs?” she asks. She’s pretty sure that the incorrect abbreviation sounds wrong and forced but hopes that it’s just because she knows she did it on purpose and Ms Candida won’t notice anything off about it.

At first, the only answer she gets is a thoughtful hum.

“Your mother is an artist,” she says, eventually “She makes a lot of things, like paintings. Mostly, she makes statues,”

A sculptor, then. It makes sense with what she’s seen of Carere Fax so far. The painting is a bit of a surprise; Aulea’s never seen Carere with so much as a hair out of place, let alone wearing clothes in the condition you’d expect from a painter. Sculpture is easier to see. There’s always a faint dusty scent in the air when Carere is around. It’s probably from whatever materials she works with.

( _It’s also convenient_ says a little voice in Aulea’s mind _she’s an artist. That means you can be one again too and nobody will look twice._

Aulea shoves the thought to the very, very back of her mind. As aware as she is that she’s lying to everyone around her on a regular basis, going that far feels manipulative.

No matter _how_ true it is that Carere being an artist will make going back to her own hobbies, once she has the dexterity for them back, easier)

“And Father?” she asks, because that’s only half an answer.

“Your father works in the Citadel,” says Ms Candida, completely unaware of how Aulea’s heart feels like it _stops_.

“With the King?” she asks, feeling a little faint and hoping it doesn’t show. If it does, she hopes it seems like a weird kind of excitement, or maybe shyness.

“Oh, no, no,” Ms Candida says, shaking her head and looking caught somewhere between not wanting to hurt a child’s feelings and... maybe wanting to laugh about something? Aulea’s not sure. Emotions are hard to read even when she’s not halfway to an existential crisis. “Your father’s work isn’t that- isn’t the sort of work where he’d meet the King. They’re just in the same building. It’s a very big building,”

 _Isn’t that important_ Aulea is almost certain she was going to say. That’s a bit of a relief. The chances of her meeting the Crown Prince are still minimal, then. It’s not as good as if both of her parents had jobs that would never bring any of them into contact with the royal family but it’s better than nothing.

“Oh, okay,” she says.

She thinks she must sound disappointed because Ms Candida’s face does A Thing so Aulea smiles as widely as she can and chirps “Thanks!” and runs out of the room.

The odds of her not being That Aulea seem to be in her favour. There’s plenty of other Auleas in Insomnia and at least one of them has _got_ to be in a better position to end up childhood friends with the Prince than she is. That’s good enough for now. Unless something drastically changes, she can comfortably tell herself she's _not_ That Aulea and put it out of her mind.

She’s moving mostly on autopilot for a bit, wandering the hallways. Eventually, she finds herself by a bookshelf not far from Fumeus’s study and pauses.

The study is generally a quiet room, when Fumeus isn’t around. It’s a good place to hide away, if she wants to.

She really wants to, right about now.

She’s relatively familiar with this particular bookcase and runs her fingers along the spines of the books until she finds one that looks like a calm read. _The Secret Forest_ is a nice kid’s series that reminds her somewhat of _The Magic Treehouse_ so she pulls the first one, the thinnest of the bunch, off of the shelf, and heads into the study. She has to hop a little to reach the door handle – and is _so glad_ that it’s a door handle and not a door knob because the latter would be much more difficult to open – and settles herself down on the floor to read.

* * *

Amelia’s gasp is very quiet but is nonetheless enough to pull Aulea out of the story, despite not hearing the door open however long ago the woman arrived.

The expression on Amelia’s face when she glances up makes it very clear that there’s no passing this off as looking at the pictures. She has definitely been caught actually reading.

She resists the urge to groan and faceplant into the book.

This is the _worst day._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (one of the very first things I figured out for the universe of this fic when I started thinking about it was how to make sure that Noct would still be a thing when the timeline hits that point, despite certain things about Aulea established early in this chapter being at play. I thought of a very fun solution, so don't worry, if/when this thing gets to that era, he'll be around :3c)


	4. Chapter 4

Aulea is almost surprised by how long it takes for the news of her ability to read to reach her parents.

She’d known it was an inevitability from the moment that Amelia caught her in the act. A three-year-old teaching themselves to read just wasn’t the kind of thing that you _didn’t_ tell the parents. Aulea had been expecting a surprise visit from one or both of them the day after the event, if not the night of.

As is, a solid three days go by – long enough for Aulea to start to think that maybe they don’t know or just don’t _care_ – before the door to the playroom cracks open and her father walks in.

They both freeze, making eye contact across the room.

Aulea because she didn’t expect him _here_ or _now_ – really, didn’t expect _anyone_ here-and-now – and she’s just been caught red-handed in the middle of something she shouldn’t be doing for the second time in a week. 

Fumeus, presumably, because he’s just walked into his daughter’s playroom and found himself in the rather odd position of having to look ever-so-slightly _up_ to make eye contact with his toddler.

“Um,” says Aulea, from atop her somewhat precarious perch, still as a statue and halfway through reaching out to add another piece of Lego to her tower.

(Okay, so the brand of colourful bricks isn’t called _Lego_ in Lucis – probably not anywhere on Eos – but she doesn’t know what its actual name is and, well, they’re colourful bricks that you click together to make shapes. It’s Lego.)

“…what are you doing up there?” asks Fumeus, apparently floundering for the correct reaction to the sight in front of him.

“Building a tower?” she says, gesturing to her in-progress masterpiece, trying to put as much _duh_ into her voice as she can. After a moment, she adds “To the roof,”

“Building a tower to the roof,” Fumeus repeats “And you… needed to stack all of your chairs on top of your toy box to do that?”

He’s looking a little bit faint, which is sort of fair. Aulea’s fully aware that she’s pretty high up for her age. She trusts her sense of balance, though, and she’s not exactly in danger of her makeshift elevation platform collapsing on her – she centred the legs of the bottom chair away from the edges of the toy box and hasn’t been moving enough to shift it around. Even if it _did_ fall over, she’s got every cushion and soft toy in the room pillowed around the base of the tower and the floor in the direction that she’s most likely to fall.

Not that Fumeus knows that. He’s never been in this room often enough to recognise the placement of the toys as anything other than childish messiness and he’s too busy looking _up_ at her to look _down_ at the legs of the bottom chair in the stack.  
Aulea feels a little bad for him but she’s not going to pretend that she doesn’t know what she’s doing.

“I can’t reach the roof on my own,” she says, matter-of-fact, and finishes reaching out to put the last brick in her hand in the centre of the tower. It completes that layer of it and she grins in triumph.

Then, heedless of the slightly panicked noise Fumeus makes, she shifts from kneeling on the top chair to sitting on it, and then shoves herself off the front.

She lands with a _whoomph_ right onto the back of a beanbag zu that’s bigger than she is, just like every time she’s done this before, and crawls off of it back onto the carpet. If she was continuing construction, she would scamper over to the box of Lego on the other side of the room and find more bricks of the right shape and colour to fill her pockets with, and then back over to her construction area to climb the chairs again – it’s a pain going back and forth, she would’ve pulled the box closer but it’s too heavy for her to move, curse her tiny toddler muscles – and fill out the next layer of the tower. Given that Fumeus is here, she doesn’t think she’ll be continuing construction just yet, so instead she wanders over to the child-sized table covered in crayons and papers that sits near the centre of the room and picks up the book sitting on it. Then, she walks up to Fumeus with it in hand and hugs it to her chest.

“You’re here t’ talk about this, right Father?” she asks. It’s not exactly the way that a three-year-old (or, well, three-and-a-half-year-old at this point, she supposes) would talk but she doesn’t really care at the moment. She has no idea _how_ a three-year-old would ask that question and they already know she can read so she’s half tempted to go all in for the image of a precociously intelligent child.

Fumeus seems to recover from the shock of witnessing her constructive endeavours and smiles – wide and warm like all of his smiles, however rarely he’s around to direct them at her.

“Yeah, I’m here to talk about that,” he says, crouching down to eye-level. Aulea tries very hard not to feel patronised. She knows full well that as far as he’s concerned, she’s three. “I hear your mother and I have something of a little scholar on our hands," 

Aulea waits but he doesn’t elaborate further. She tilts her head to the side and holds the book out.

“D’you want me to read to you?” she asks.

“That would be lovely,” Fumeus replies. “We can sit down and you could pick up where you left off? If I don’t understand anything in the story, you can explain it to me,”

Given that Aulea finished the book she’s holding the night before, that pretty much gives her free reign to pick anywhere in it to start. So she plops herself down on the floor and starts flicking through the pages.

Fumeus makes a noise that she tentatively identifies as confused. She glances up.

“Don’t, ah, don’t you want to sit in a chair?” he asks. His eyes flicker to the tower of them and he corrects himself “Or on something more comfortable, like one of the beanbags?" 

“No, here’s fine,” Aulea replies, and goes back to her search for a good page to start at.

There’s silence but for the sound of turning pages for a moment. Then Fumeus sits down on the floor next to her.

She picks a page, glances up at him to check if he’s paying attention, and then starts reading. Reading aloud was never a talent of hers, Before, especially not with an audience, and she’s almost glad that that hasn’t changed. She stumbles over words, has to restart sentences to get her inflection right, mispronounces a word or two, and some of it isn’t even faked. 

She works her way through two chapters, feeling increasingly aware of Fumeus reading over her shoulder. 

“I see what Amelia meant,” he says, taking the opportunity of her pausing for breath to interject. “You’re very good at reading, Aulea,”

It’s a simple statement that sends two parts of her to war with each other – one part fuelled by a love of affirmation, pleased to receive praise even if for a simple task, the other a twenty-year-old university student who feels _mortally_ patronised – so Aulea just shrugs her shoulders and ducks her head to hide the tiny twitch of her lips that wants to be a full blown smile.

“Thanks,” she mumbles.

Fumeus pats her on the shoulder (confirming her burgeoning suspicions that he has absolutely no idea how to interact with children) and asks her a question that she really should have expected and yet didn’t see coming.

“How about we go talk to your mother and see what we can do about getting you a tutor?”

* * *

Carere is all for the idea of getting her a tutor, so that settles the matter. Aulea herself isn’t quite sure how she feels about the idea but she’s tentatively hopeful; a tutor is a new person to talk to, someone who’ll actively be sharing information, _and_ someone who never met her before she remembered Before, so she doesn’t have to worry about trying to not have obviously changed. Those’re all good things. Plus, it’ll give her an excuse for knowing how to write.

She hasn’t taken the chance to write down what she remembers yet. At first, she kept forgetting, in the worry about whether or not she was That Aulea, and then when she did remember she was too worried about someone finding her notes.

Of course, it could just as easily go wrong. She knows too well the pains of a bad teacher and she’d be lying if she said she’s not even a little worried about getting patronised. She’s also scared of the opposite end of the spectrum, getting noticed as being _too_ smart. It’s exhausting, being scared of both extremes and being unsure how to walk the middle ground.

It’s also somewhat exhausting that her parents are worlds more eager about the situation than she is. She’s pretty sure she’s heard them tossing the word _prodigy_ back and forth when they think she can’t hear them and that is _not_ a label she wants to get stuck with.

In the end, though, she finds herself sitting in an armchair, kicking her feet and watching while the prospective tutor explains, at length, that there is a difference between _prodigy_ and _precocious_ and _while she might be developing very quickly now, Lady Fax, there’s a high chance that she’ll simply plateau and her peers will catch up._

Aulea likes her already.

* * *

She takes back every concern she had about getting a tutor. Having a tutor is _great._

It’s a little frustrating being back at very beginning of education, yeah, but it feels good to be doing _something_ structured again. It’s more like preschool classes than anything else, with games and play incorporated as much as anything else, but she isn’t really going to argue with that. She’s getting to write (and doing a good job pretending she doesn’t already know how, courtesy of a frustrating lack of manual dexterity) and to gradually step up her reading and getting actual _directed learning_ about the history and geography of the world she’s in, rather than the haphazard self-directed method of reading everything she could get her hands on with zero context that she’d been relying on before.

Moliri is also just the best. She answers every question Aulea asks and is always ready with a word of encouragement. She’s fine with derailing a lesson into a discussion about any given topic, answers Aulea’s random factoids with her own, and doesn’t talk down to her. Plus, she brings new books with her and gives her _stickers._

(Stickers almost make being at the start of education again worth it. Almost.)

If it weren’t for the fact that she never laughs at her jokes, Aulea would think she was too good to be true.

Moliri comes by five days a week, Aulea sits in the playroom with her for four hours doing anything from practicing writing to drawing to eating snacks and talking, sometimes even getting help with a ‘construction project’ (Moliri’s shoulders are a far superior vantage point for building towers) and it’s probably the happiest she’s been since she remembered.

* * *

Her fourth birthday comes and goes and after what feels like an age, Aulea gets her writing more-or-less under control.

She smuggles pages of paper from the playroom to her bedroom, builds up a hidden pile behind her bed, and waits until she hears everyone else go to bed. Then, she slips out of bed, pulls the papers out, picks up the black crayon she ‘forgot’ to put away, and starts writing.

There’s _so much_ to write. She titles the first page _Things I Don’t Want To Forget_ and starts listing. It’s not just what she remembers of this world that she needs to write, it’s _everything._

The world seems to fade away but for her and her task. She writes down her parents’ names (not Carere and Fumeus, not ‘mother’ and ‘father’, but _Mum_ and _Dad)_ and her brother’s and her sister’s and then her friends’, her aunties’ and uncles’ and cousins’. The entire first page is names and a label of who they were to her. In much smaller writing, in the bottom corner, she writes the name that isn’t hers anymore, underlines it, and leaves it unlabelled. Pulling up more paper, she writes down happy memories and sad memories and every family story she still knows and then follows it up with the myths and legends from home she still remembers. She pretends there aren’t tears pooling on the wax as she dots the full stop at the end of the last sentence of _Robert the Bruce and the Spider_ and moves on to writing down recipes. Dad’s stovies and Mum’s broccoli soup and the chocolate muffins a family friend had passed on. Then the lyrics of every nursery rhyme she knows and _then_ the lyrics of all her favourite songs. The names and steps of her favourite ceilidh dances. Each and every thing she can think of from her life on Earth that might not exist on Eos.

And then, on a clean sheet of paper, she writes every single detail she remembers about _Final Fantasy XV._ Every big event, every date.

She pulls up a second clean sheet of paper, turns it landscape, and starts planning out a timeline.

Finally, when it’s done, she lets the crayon drop limply from her hand. She sits up, cradles an _aching_ wrist to her chest, and looks over what she’s made.

It’s a decent timeline. Missing a lot of information at first and then rapidly gaining a lot all clustered together. It gives her, at the very least, an idea of where to start.

(A part of her wonders if maybe she shouldn’t do anything. Things turn out sort of okay in the end, the Starscourge gets banished, should she really risk interfering with that?

_Yes_ says all of the rest of her because _so many people die_ before that happens and she’s in a position to try and save those lives. _Yes_ says all of the rest of her because the world spends ten years in darkness before that happens and so much of it will be ruins before the sun rises again and she’s in a position to try and keep that from happening. _Yes_ says all of the rest of her because the way that it happens requires so much pain and is so cruel and _she’s in a position to try and change that_ )

She reaches out and traces a finger along the timeline, all the way from the _M.E. 709_ of the present to the _M.E. 756_ marked _Insomnia falls._

_Forty seven years to save the world_ she thinks, staring at the stark black words _I think I can work with that._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FUN FACT: Everything from Chapter 2 until this point was supposed to be one chapter
> 
> Literally in my outline, the events of the past three chapters are bullet pointed under “Chapter One”
> 
> Except then I started writing it and it just _wouldn’t end_


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There was a delay on this one because I initially started writing & posting this fic during the middle of exam season because I Have Weird Coping Mechanisms and then when I finished my exams I kinda just. was exhausted.  
> What I'm _hoping_ to do is build up a bit of a backlog on written chapters so that I can post at a sort-of regular pace but I literally just finished writing this one and Had To Post It Immediately, so... we'll see if that plan works out or not.

The best kinds of school playgrounds, in Aulea’s opinion, are the ones that have picnic tables and quiet corners where you can sit on your own with nobody bothering you. That way, you can sit and read whatever you want while still getting fresh air and sunshine. If there’s a vantage spot for the rare days you don’t want to read and would rather people watch, well, that’s just a bonus.

The sun is high in the sky but the tree the picnic table sits under shades it neatly. There’s a cool breeze in the air and there are birds chirping somewhere above her. It’s a nice day and she’s looking forwards to a nice hour of peaceful reading.

“Y’know, Lea, I kinda thought that the whole point of you being here was that your parents wanted you to spend time with other kids,”

Aulea glances up from her book and pulls a face.

“I _am,”_ she says, waving a hand towards the playground, where the gaggles of other children are running around and shrieking. “I’m in the vicinity of other kids,”

Hepatica pulls a face in return, the expression so overly exaggerated that Aulea giggles despite herself. It earns her a grin and an eyeroll. She starts to shuffle to the side a little so Hepatica can sit down but the other girl slips onto the bench on the other side of the table instead.

“That’s not what _anyone_ means when they tell you to spend time with other kids and you _know_ it,” she says, crossing her arms on the table and dropping her head into them, peering up at Aulea with a wobbly gaze “You’re meant to, y’know, _talk_ to them and stuff,”

“I talk to you,” Aulea points out, looking back at her book.

A hand flops across the page, blocking the words. She pushes it aside. A second hand replaces it almost instantly. She shoves that one aside too. The first one returns.

She looks back to Hepatica, who now has her chin resting on the table and is wearing the most put-upon version of puppy dog eyes possible. Aulea sighs to the heavens and slips a bookmark into place and snaps the book shut.

Hepatica’s plaintive expression vanishes instantly and she shoots upright, a sunny grin in place.

“There we go!” she crows _“Now_ we’re both on the same planet!”

“Why are we friends,” Aulea says, the flatness of the statement undercut by the fact that she can’t help the smile twitching in return.

“Because I’m a very lovable person,” Hepatica replies.

“That doesn’t sound right,”

“Oh Aulea, you _wound_ me,”

“Yes. You deserved it. You made me close my book,”

“Oh the _humanity,”_

Aulea snorts. Hepatica grins wider in response, amber eyes glittering. For a few moments, they lapse into silence, just enjoying each other’s company. Aulea is almost tempted to try opening her book again but she has a feeling she wouldn’t get very far.

Then, Hepatica’s face drops.

“I’m worried about you, Lea,” she says “You need to interact with more people,”

Aulea _groans,_ loud and drawn out.

“Not you _too,_ Tica!” she complains “You sound like _Moliri,”_

“Maybe Miss Beatitudo has a point,” Hepatica says, uncharacteristically quiet.

Aulea frowns, leaning forwards across the table and squinting at her friend.

“Okay,” she says, drawing out the vowel “What’s _really_ bothering you?”

Hepatica draws back, blinking.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re acting all worried about me talking to people all of a sudden,” Aulea says, still leaning forwards but not squinting anymore. “You’ve never brought this up before. We’ve joked about the _opposite_ of this before – how many times’ve you joked about being the only one adventurous enough to talk to the weird bookworm? – and now you’re talking about me spending time with other kids? _Something_ brought this on,”

Hepatica blinks at her a few more times. Aulea flushes and sits up straight again, pulling her hands to her lap and bunching her skirt between her fingers. _Maybe that was too grown up_ she thinks, but the thought doesn’t carry the thrill of fear of being caught that it would’ve three years before.

“It’s... super weird when you do that, Lea,” Hepatica says.

“Don’t change the subject, we both already know I’m weird,”

A feeble smile – _another_ sign that something’s wrong – and a long, overdrawn sigh.

“I’m in my last year of elementary school, Aulea. I’m gonna be moving on to junior high soon,” she says “I’m just... worried about what you’re gonna do without me,”

This time, Aulea is the one blinking.

“Oh,” she says. Then, “Oh, is that all?”

Before Hepatica can respond, Aulea twists around to dig through her bag and pulls out a notebook.

“That’s an _easy_ one, Tica,” she says, flipping through it and then sliding it across the table “I already figured it out,”

The paper is baby blue and has a faint print of lilac foxes walking along the bottom border (she’d spotted this particular notebook while accompanying Castus on a grocery run and immediately fallen in love) and written across the whole page, in her only-a-little-messier-than-Before handwriting, in sparkly black gel pen, is her plan for what to do when the current school year comes to a close and then next one begins.

 _Plan for M.E 713_ it reads _Follow Hepatica Flōris to junior high._

“...I don’t think it’s that simple,” Hepatica says, after a long minute.

“'Course it is!” Aulea chirps, flipping the notebook closed again and pulling it back across to herself “Moliri says I’m pretty much already doing junior high level stuff in our lessons and the whole point of me hanging out here at break and lunchtime is to socialise me more, so it’s perfectly logical for me to follow my only friend to junior high instead of sticking around here with kids I never talk to,”

A beat of silence, then two. Then Hepatica laughs, bright and clear.

“You’re _something else,_ Aulea Fax,” she says.

“I know,” Aulea replies, sending Hepatica into more peals of laughter at the cheery tone.

They grin at each other but before either can speak another word, the end-of-break bell rings across the playground. Reluctantly, Hepatica heads back to her class and Aulea, with a parting _“See you at lunch!”_ , darts off towards the front office to meet Castus and head home.

* * *

Tuesdays are fun because, other than her regularly scheduled times spent at the local school playground, she doesn’t actually have any responsibilities on them. The two hours between morning break and lunchtime are hers to do with as she wishes.

Usually, she’d sit and draw or practice her sewing (one upon a time, she would have written, but inspiration has been frustratingly hard to come by and her few attempts have resulted in painful bouts of homesickness and paper ruined by tears, so she’s given up on that for now) but today, she has more important things to do.

She slips into the chair at her desk – a welcome addition to her bedroom – pulls out the book Hepatica interrupted her reading of and gets back to the passage she’d been on before.

 _The tides and currents surrounding the Umbral Isle are temperamental at best. It is only at certain times of the year, sometimes only on certain days, that they calm and shift in such a way that one could access the island by boat. Though in the present day, Angelgard’s status as sacred ground means that none dare approach her shores, records from the days when that status instead attracted pilgrims survive and tell us of the days when such excursions would be possible-_ declares page thirty four of _A Comprehensive Guide To Islands Across Eos_.

She pushes away from the desk, darts to her bed, and pulls out one of the many, _many_ diaries hidden below it. They’re not _really_ hidden, everybody knows that they’re there, but they’re not _really_ diaries either, so it doesn’t matter. No, what matters is that they come with padlocks – childishly simple ones, yes, but padlocks all the same – and the impression that everybody else has of them being diaries means it’s unlikely that anybody currently in a position to find them is likely to read them. It’s a semi-solid illusion of privacy and she’ll take what she can get.

The one she pulls out has a cover designed to look like postcards, the most prominent being an oceanic view from Galdin Quay.

She opens it up, flips to the page currently entitled _Angelgard Plan_ and starts copying down the information from _Islands Across Eos._

It may or may not ever be a viable plan but all she can do for now is research. So research she does.

* * *

After lunch on a Tuesday, the whole rest of the day opens up. She’s beholden to no-one and nothing, other than a six o’clock dinnertime and a _be inside before it gets dark_ curfew.

Naturally, she uses this freedom to wander off and explore for hours.

She’s been pushing her boundaries for as long as she’s been able to get out of the grounds, seeing how far she can go before getting called back. Things really only opened up once she turned seven, so the freedom to really go _exploring_ has only been a feature of her life for a few months, but she makes the best use of it that she can.

Strictly speaking, as long as she doesn’t let on to the adults just how _far_ she goes on her walks outside of the grounds, there hasn’t been a limit set to how far she’s allowed to go. She takes full advantage of that fact.

The woodland area that’s her favourite for Tuesday afternoon walks is _probably_ too far from the house for a seven year old to go on her own but, well, she’s not _really_ seven and she’s not breaking any rules as long as nobody knows about it.

Nature is a much more pleasant place to enjoy without hayfever.

Plus, there’s never anybody else there, so she can just... do whatever she wants without the risk of any odd looks.

Aulea’s laughter rings loud and clear through the otherwise peaceful forest as she runs, dodging and weaving around roots and zooming up and down dips in the ground. It’s exhilarating and at this point she knows this path like the back of her hand.

There’s a fallen tree trunk coming up and she’s pretty sure that _today_ , she’s finally built up enough momentum to successfully vault it.

She leaps moments before she would have collided with hard, dead wood, slams her hands against the top of the curve of the trunk to manoeuvre herself in the air, twists to let momentum carry her, finally, _finally,_ clearing the whole trunk and flying over it and-

- _ohshootthat’saperson-_

 _-_ plows straight into the boy on the other side without so much as a word of warning.

Enough momentum to vault the tree trunk? Check. Enough momentum to send two children tumbling a good distance across the woodland floor? _Also_ check.

Staring up at the canopy of leaves above her, Aulea finds herself grateful for the lower pain sensitivity she has now. She aches, the contents of her rucksack are digging into her spine, and there’s a scratch on one of her legs that stings but she can all but feel the ghost of how much _more_ this would hurt in her old body.

There’s not long to think about it, though, before her view of the canopy is blocked by a face. A pair of green eyes framed by dark brown hair meet hers for a moment, sending a jolt of pain across her sternum before her gaze skitters away.

“Hey,” the boy she collided with says, his brow furrowing in what she thinks might be concern “Are you okay?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You all know who that is


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> .......so this took a while. Oops. On the upside, I've done a lot of plotting and worldbuilding in the meantime! And I've got a decent amount of the next chapter written so hopefully the next wait won't be as long!  
> This is the longest chapter yet and it's fully because it just _kept going._ Writing these interactions was fun and they didn't want to stop.

It takes a moment for the words to register.

“Am _I_ okay?” she repeats, slightly baffled. “I’m the one that hit _you,”_

“Yes,” the boy agrees, shrugging – which looks really weird when he’s above her and also perpendicular – and then making a vague gesture in the direction of her legs “However, you are the one bleeding,”

 _That_ is a concerning statement and she immediately shoves herself upright, avoiding a head on face-to-face collision solely by virtue of the boy having quick enough reflexes to pull back before she can clonk him for a second time.

Sure enough, what she thought was just a stringing scratch is, in fact, a sluggishly bleeding shallow cut.

“Huh,” she says, staring at the blood and mentally upping her estimations for just how much higher her pain tolerance is now.

“You’re very calm,” the boy says from beside her. She glances over and he’s sitting on his knees, hands folded neatly in his lap, head tilted ever so slightly in curiosity “Doesn’t it hurt?”

(Something about his accent twings at her memory but she brushes it aside. So many things in Insomnia register as _just familiar enough_ that she finds herself looking or checking or wondering and they’re almost always just _different_ enough on closer inspection that she disappoints herself. She’s not going to get her hopes up that he might have a different accent to most of the Insomnians she’s spoken to for the same reason _she’s_ got a ‘weird’ accent)

“A little,” she says, tucking her not-bleeding leg beneath her and slinging her rucksack off and settling it against her side “I’m prepared, though, so it’s fine,”

She unzips the bag, pulls Coeurl out and gently settles him in her lap so he won’t get in the way, and sets about digging through the rest. Absentmindedly, she pulls one particular thing that seems determined to keep getting in the way out and shoves it into the boy’s hands with a mumbled _“hold this”_. Finally, after a lot of shoving notebooks aside, she finds her little ziploc bag of first aid supplies buried at the bottom.

Rolling her eyes, because _of course_ it ended up buried at the bottom, that’s _always_ where the thing you’re looking for ended up, she pulls it out and sets to work. She applies pressure around the cut with one hand, wets a cotton pad from a small bottle of antiseptic with the other, and carefully wipes it clean. Then she gently dabs some antiseptic cream over it. (Two rounds of antiseptic might be overdoing it a wee bit but it was how her mum and had taught her to do it and she’s infection free across two lifetimes, so she’s sticking with it)

The finishing touch is a bright red plaster emblazoned with yellow lightning bolts – the design had reminded her so viscerally of the Flash the first time she’d spotted it that she’s _begged_ Castus until he’d bought them and he’s bought the same brand and design ever since, probably because she never bothers to hide that they make her happy – that fits nice and neatly over the cut.

Nodding with satisfaction at her work, she bundles the first aid supplies back into her rucksack – save the used cotton pad and plaster wrapper, which she shoves into the pockets of her shorts – and turns to face the boy again, an apology for shoving her stuff into his arms on her lips.

Instead, she finds herself grinning when she realises that he’s reading the blurb of the graphic novel she shoved into his hands with a look of... at least _interest_ , maybe _wonderment_ , definitely something positive, on his face. Good. It’s a good series, more people should read it.

He seems to realise he’s being watched, given the way his head jerks back up like he’s startled.

“Ah,” he says, face dusting pink.

Wordlessly, he holds the graphic novel out to her, even though she hasn’t actually asked for it back. She takes it and tucks it away. A part of her wants to offer to let him read it but she’s not sure if that would be weird.

Strange girls who tackle you in the woods and then offer to let you read their comics certainly _seems_ like a concept that _should_ be weird, in her head.

“Hi,” she says instead, shoving one hand forwards for a handshake “Sorry I accidentally tackled you. There’s not usually anybody else out here so I didn’t check if the other side of the log was clear, though I probably should’ve anyways just in case there’d been a stray cat or something,”

He blinks at her, wide-eyed.

“Um,” he says, head tilting again, just the slightest bit “It’s... okay?”

The words sound awkward and tilted. Not insincere but... like they’re an odd shape in his mouth that he’s not used to making yet.

She glances over his clothes – a _polo shirt_ , of all things, and pleated trousers, and shoes that are definitely not trainers but she hesitates to identify as dress shoes, all in a shade of black that the regular people of Insomnia rarely seem to wear, and a fancy watch on his wrist – and his haircut – shoulder-length and clearly shaped, falling in such a way that it looks mostly neat even though he’s just taken a tumble through the dirt – and considers those in tandem with the fact that he is _also_ out in the woods during regular school hours.

 _Noble kid_ she deduces. Then, from the fact that he’s just a little shorter than her _probably about my age._

“I’m Aulea Fax,” she says, waggling the fingers of her outstretched hand a little because he still hasn’t shaken it “What’s your name?”

“Nox!” he blurts, almost lunging to grab her hand and shake it “Nox Luc- Lucibus! Nox Lucibus, that’s my name,”

She resists the urge to raise an eyebrow at him. That couldn’t more obviously be a fake name if he was _trying_. Especially since he’s literally only just handed her back her copy of _The Adventures of Astraeus Nox Vol III._

 _He snuck out_ she decides. The nervousness on his face is so obvious that even she can tell what it is. It’d be mean to point out that she knows he’s lying, probably. If he doesn’t want her to know, he doesn’t want her to know.

Plus, _Nox Lucibus_ is just an adorable name. _Night light._ If this isn’t a one-time meeting, she’s _so_ using that.

“Cool!” she chirps, pulling her hand back and petting Coeurl, who’s still sitting in her lap. “I’m seven! How old are you?”

“Seven,” he says, folding his hands in his lap again but smiling with all the excitement of a child meeting someone who’s the same age as them.

“We’re the same age!” She leans forwards and grins and, because they’re both kids and she knows she can get away with it in a way that doesn’t really work after you grow up, asks “D’you wanna be friends?”

She chances a glance at his eyes just in time to see them _light up._ The look on his face is almost _hungry_ and she thinks _yeah, this is the right decision._

“Yes!” he says, the word bursting from his mouth like he can’t possibly say it fast enough, like the question it’s in answer to will retroactively have never been asked if his answer isn’t loud enough.

“Yay!” she says, bouncing to her feet and slinging her rucksack back onto her back in the same motion, shifting Coeurl from lap to hand “C’mon, I know a great tree to climb!”

He scrambles to his feet to follow her. She wonders how long it’ll take him to notice the twig in his hair or if she’ll have to point it out.

* * *

Nox is _very_ good at climbing trees, she finds. He’s a bit slow, clearly trying to protect his clothes and also _really_ not wearing shoes which are conductive to the task, but he’s also efficient. He clambers a path up the trunk that she’d never considered, reaching a perch just across from hers far more smoothly than she managed.

She smiles and tells him so and he looks startled for a moment and then _grins_ right back at her.

The tree is a big, old oak and it’s easy to tuck themselves up against the trunk and just sit there comfortably on the branches. It’s a nice place to come to read or write or draw, she’s found.

She _does_ offer to let him read the graphic novel this time, since they’re friends now so it shouldn’t be weird anymore, and he eagerly accepts. She pulls out an unlined notebook that she uses for doodling and a pencil and starts sketching. They sit in companionable silence for a while, with just the sounds of scratching pencil and turning pages and the chirping of birds. It’s nice.

She’s well into a page full of doodles of seagulls – which Eos doesn’t seem to have and she’s pretty sure she misses _solely_ for that reason – when Nox suddenly gasps.

“I need to go!” he says, sounding very worried. He leans across and all but shoves the graphic novel into her arms and then scrambles down the tree, still being oh-so-careful about his clothes but descending faster than he ascended thanks to gravity’s help.

It looks like he’s going to bolt without even saying goodbye and there’s no way she can get down the tree fast enough to catch him, so instead she yells “Wait!”, surprising herself with how panicked she sounds.

He stops and glances back over his shoulder.

“Are you in trouble?” she asks.

“Not if I’m fast,” he says, bouncing on his heels.

She sucks both cheeks between her teeth for a few seconds and then asks:

“Will you come back?”

His eyes widen, the same startled look he’d had when she complimented his tree climbing skills.

“Not today,” he says, biting his lip “Maybe... maybe next week? I’ll try,”

“Okay,” she says “Meet you by the log?”

He nods, still bouncing, getting more restless by the second.

“Be safe, Nightlight,” she says.

His wide eyes go wider and suspiciously bright and he nods again, then sprints off.

She waits in the tree for a little while – if he didn’t want her to know his real name, he probably doesn’t want her to know which direction he’s going in either – then packs her stuff back into her rucksack and climbs down and heads home, even though it’s nowhere near dark yet.

* * *

There’s a book in Fumeus’s – in _Father’s_ – study about the noble families of Lucis. It doesn’t surprise her at all that there’s zero mention of a Lucibus family.

She goes to the living room and watches a documentary about chocobos and wonders if Nox will be there next week.

* * *

Tica is the one asking _her_ what’s wrong at school the next day.

“I think I made a friend,” she says, thinking about how easy it had been to just sit and do stuff in each other’s presence “but I’m not sure if I’m going to see him again,”

Hepatica is delighted and grins reassuringly, gently punches her in the shoulder and says “’Course you will! Who wouldn’t come back for _you?”_

Aulea tries very hard not to think about the many people who _didn’t_ , Before. It’s a completely different situation. She doesn’t need to connect old worries to it.

* * *

The thing is, he’d been _nice._ He’d been _kind._ She’d all but flown out of nowhere and knocked him rolling in the dirt and his first thought afterwards was to check if _she_ was okay because she was bleeding and he wasn’t.

The thing is, being around him had been _easy_ in a way that nothing has been since she woke up _remembering._ She hadn’t hesitated, hadn’t felt like she was hiding. Something had _clicked_.

The thing is, she _recognised_ that hunger in his eyes when she offered him friendship. She’d lived with it once herself, for years, when she wasn’t that much older than he is.

The thing is, he’d definitely been about to cry when she told him to be safe and given him a nickname.

The thing is-

* * *

He doesn’t show up the next week.

* * *

But he does the week after that.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aulea & Regis: [are in a scene together]  
> 1000+ Words of Bonding: [spontaneously generate]  
> Me: Yay! Can you... do that for the plot, please?  
> Whichever Writing Gremlin In My Brain Is Responsible For This: No.

“You’re here,”

Aulea glances up from the puzzle ball she’d been playing with and grins.

“Yup!” she chirps “Hi, Nightlight,”

“You’re _here,”_ he repeats, blinking rapidly, eyes suspiciously shiny “I- I didn’t think you would be. I wasn’t here, last week,”

“You said you’d _try,”_ she replies “I figured I should wait just in case you tried again,”

He scrubs at his eyes.

 _“Thank you,”_ he says, the words more raw than anything that comes out of a seven year old’s mouth should be. It makes her heart ache.

“We’re friends, aren’t we?” she says, dropping the puzzle ball into the gap between her crossed legs “I wanted to see you again too,” she inclines her head towards her rucksack, leaning up against the log next to her “I brought Volume One of _Astraeus Nox,_ if you want to read it?”

He’s definitely crying now. Tears are _streaming_ down his cheeks and he’s blinking rapidly like it’ll make it stop and the instincts born of a lifetime’s worth of being an older sister take over in the face of a crying child.

The puzzle ball finds itself evicted from her lap and dropped next to the rucksack and she scrambles to her feet.

“Want a hug?” she offers, opening her arms.

He cries _harder,_ then nods shakily and all but throws himself into it, colliding with her and holding tight like she’ll vanish or push him away at any moment.

She hugs back just as hard. There’s a desperation she recognises in his grip and she resolves that she’s not going to loosen the embrace until he does. They can hug as long as he needs. He seems to really, _really_ need it.

 _We met a fortnight ago_ she thinks, shifting her grip the slightest bit to make it a bit more comfortable for them both _We met **once** , a fortnight ago, and hung out for an hour, and he’s clinging to me like this because I called us friends and offered him a hug._

Once upon a time, she’d only ever hugged her _parents_ the way he’s hugging her now. Her heart aches more and there’s a painful twinge in her gut.

 _You really need a friend, don’t you?_ she thinks, one hand starting to rub soothing circles against his shoulder, sucking her cheeks between her teeth as she starts mentally rearranging a few things.

* * *

Eventually, they both sink to the ground, mostly because Aulea’s legs start aching from standing in one place too long. When they do, Nox tentatively pulls away from the hug and scrubs at his eyes. He winces when he notices the wet patch on her shoulder.

“Sorry,” he says, the rest of his face flaming about as red as his eyes already are.

She pulls at the t-shirt a little to get a better glance at it to asses, then shrugs.

“It’s just salt water,” she tells him, smiling “Could’ve been worse, could’ve been snotters. Would’ve been fine even if it was, though, because you clearly needed that cry,”

He tilts his head – she suspects a small part of her is never going to stop being delighted that she’s found someone else who actually does that in real life – and frowns.

“Snotters?” he asks.

“Yeah,” she replies, turning to look through her rucksack. She’s only just undone the zip when she realises “Oh, you meant- you don’t know what that word means, do you,”

He shakes his head.

“Mucus,” she says, making a dripping gesture under her nose “The stuff that comes out of your nose when it’s runny because you’re sick or you cried really hard. Snotters,”

Nox _beams,_ the expression bright against the tear tracks and puffy eyes.

“That’s a good word for that,” he says.

She hums a positive reply, back to looking through her rucksack. It’s not nearly as tricky to get what she wants this time around, since it’s significantly more difficult for one of the particular items she wants to get stuck at the bottom, compared to her homemade first aid kit, and she put the other right next to it so it wouldn’t get lost, just in case.

“Ta-da!” she says, pulling the water bottle out and waggling it in his direction. “Rehydrate, you just lost a lot of fluids,”

He blinks at her but takes the bottle. He doesn’t drink any of it though, just holds it uncertainly and all but squints at the lid and the dark liquid inside.

“It’s fresh,” she assures “Filled it just before I left the house,”

He glances between her and the bottle but still doesn’t drink. After a cry like that, his head must be _pounding_ but he maintains an expression so uncertain, even she can tell. She sucks one cheek between her teeth again and thinks _why would **I** be hesitant to drink something?_ followed very quickly by _Oh. Of course._

“It’s ribena,” she says “Y’know, blackcurrant squash,”

His expression clears and a tension she hadn’t noticed loosens in his shoulders. He flips the lid open and starts drinking. She nods, satisfied. When he’s had his fill – which ends up being three quarters of the bottle, so he probably needed a drink even before he cried into her shoulder – and passes the bottle back to her, she shoves the second item into his hands.

“Baby wipes?” he asks, looking between the packet in his hands and her a few times “What....?”

“For your face,” she says, gesturing like she’s wiping her own “So that nobody notices that you were crying when you head back, as long as you head back after your eyes stop being red. They’re safe to use on faces, I asked Amelia, and she said that if they’re safe enough for baby skin, they’re probably safe enough for faces,”

The explanation visibly hits like a light bulb turning on and he smiles at her again.

“You’re really smart,” he says, pulling one of the wipes out of the packet and setting to work on his face.

The smile that splits across her face at that almost _hurts_ and something warm and bright nestles in her ribcage. She can’t quite help ducking her head a little.

“Thanks,” she says, voice a little caught.

He pushes the package back towards her, face cleared of tear tracks and puffy red eyes already starting to return to normal.

“Have you just got _everything_ in there?” he asks, pointing at her rucksack.

She runs through a quick mental inventory – _first aid kit, water bottle, wipes, notebooks, sketchpad, comics, pens, pencils, Coeurl, scissors –_ and then shrugs.

“More or less?” she says “I like being prepared,”

Especially for spontaneous crying fits. It’s always good to have supplies for those to hand; people always get so _worried_ if she goes around having obviously cried recently and there’s nothing they can do about the homesickness so she prefers to just avoid the concern.

They lapse into silence but it’s more awkward than the companionable one they shared in the tree.

She pulls _Adventures of Astraeus Nox Vol I_ out of her rucksack and holds it out to him.

“I really did bring this for you, Nightlight,” she says “I thought you’d want to start at the beginning. I didn’t bring the same one I had last time, sorry, because I’m on Volume Six now, so I brought that one for myself, but...”

He takes it from her hands, smiling.

“Thanks, Aulea,” he says and the name actually sounds fully _right._

* * *

She all but skips into the playground at break time the next day. She’s swinging her legs and happily humming a jaunty rendition of _Three Craws_ to herself when Tica strolls over to join her.

“He came back?” she asks without preamble, before she even sits down.

“He came back!” Aulea confirms, grinning “We talked and read comics more. He’s gonna keep trying to come back,”

“Well then,” Tica says, going around the table and slipping onto the bench next to her, slinging an arm over her shoulders “Didn’t I tell you that you didn’t have anything to worry about?”

“You did,” she confirms, leaning into the touch. It’s warm and easy and comfortable.

There’s a scream of laughter from across the playground. Something about it draws Aulea’s attention and she finds her gaze alighting on very familiar structures.

She tilts her head back, up against Tica’s shoulder, to look at her friend’s face.

“Hey Tica?” she asks “Do... do you wanna go on the swings?”

There’s a pause and a small part of Aulea whispers _oh no, I messed up, abort ABORT-_ but then Tica _grins_ down at her.

“This new friend of yours is being a good influence already,” she says.

Aulea almost wants to protest but before she can, Tica has taken advantage of the half-hug to sweep her up into a bridal carry and clambered off of the bench to sprint as far across the playground to the swings as she can manage before she has to put her down or risk dropping her.

Laughter bubbles up in her throat and she flings her arms around Tica’s neck to try and help the carry and she thinks that between yesterday and today, she can count this as a very good week, even if the rest of it should end up being not-so-great.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What Aulea Thinks Is The Reason He Hesitated To Drink: he’s not sure what the drink is and is hesitating in case he doesn’t like it  
> What The Actual Reason Is: about 50% that and 50% lessons about Being Wary Of Poison rearing their heads, even though he just sobbed into her shoulder and they're both seven
> 
> Also..... listen. If FFXV canon gets to have Assassin’s Creed literally just Exist. Then I get to have ribena. That’s Just How It Works.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _whoops I accidentally uploaded this with the post date still set to when I drafted it_  
>  Apologies to anyone who got two update notifications XP It's just the one chapter.

When Aulea wakes to the all too familiar pangs of homesickness, her first thought is _I don’t remember tempting fate recently._

It would have been acceptable narrative irony for her life if she’d woken up feeling like this on _any_ day of the week she and Nightlight properly became friends but it’s been almost a year since then. The deadline on fate being allowed to fulfil that offered temptation has _long_ passed.

She stares up at the ceiling for a while, watching her vision gradually start to swim and then shoot back to clarity each time she blinks. There’s a magnetic grip around her heart, firm and inexorable, pulling on her to return to a place far out of her reach. Maybe she should just go back to sleep. The ache might be gone when she wakes up again; it’s worked before, in both lifetimes. If it doesn’t this time, maybe she’ll just sleep the whole day away. It’s a Saturday, after all. She has no responsibilities. Dreaming of home sounds nicer than trudging through the waking world with an insatiable need she can never fill burning in her chest.

_Go home, go home, go home_ whispers a little voice, rhythmic with the beat of her heart.

_I can’t_ she murmurs back. Her eyes slip shut, cheeks still damp. Coeurl is soft, tucked against the crook of her neck as always, and she can almost trick her brain into thinking that he’s Tiger instead. He’s Tiger and she’s in bed at home and the distant sound of the front door opening and shutting is her mum seeing her dad off to work and the footsteps down the hall are her sister nabbing the bathroom before their brother can-

The ghosts of flavours linger on her tongue. Pizza and chips, the parts of a munchie box that she always laid first claim to when she and her friends split one for lunch back in High School. She can almost feel the grease on her lips, the phantom of the heat in her throat.

_Unfair._

It’s not the worst craving she could have woken up with. _That_ honour goes to the time she woke craving soor plooms, with the many times she’s woken wanting stovies holding a tied second place. Insomnia does _have_ both pizza and chips, even if they’ll never quite taste the same, while stovies are a distant dream until she’s allowed to use the kitchen herself and soor plooms are only ever going to be a memory. But _still_. Unfair.

Going back to sleep isn’t going to be an option with that haunting her.

She sighs, loud and long and dramatic, fully emptying her lungs of breath. Her displeasure with this turn of events needs to be _fully_ vocalised. Then she kicks her covers into a ball at the bottom of her bed and pulls herself upright, legs crossed and one hand scrubbing at her eyes. Coeurl flops into her lap and she cradles him in her hands as she shifts him to his rightful place lying next to her pillow. He might not be the _right_ comfort object to soothe the desperately yearning ache inside of her but he’s still _a_ comfort object.

A part of her wonders if sleeping the day – and the homesickness – away was ever going to work, even if the cravings hadn’t decided to show. She hasn’t really _tried_ to sleep that much, the past five years, and she’s never been good at napping. One solid block or nothing, in spite of her best efforts. Even now, she finds herself wondering how she’d survived two years of university with an inability to nap and distaste for all the most common caffeine sources.

She’s stalling. This train of thought is procrastination in disguise. She regrets being able to recognise that.

Another sigh and she scoots herself over to the side of the bed and uncrosses her legs to swing them over the side. She braces her feet against the carpet, leverages her hands against the edge of the bed, and shoves herself up to standing.

The pull on her heart shifts to a weight dragging downwards.

She ignores it with practiced not-quite-ease and lets herself drop into the familiarity of morning routine instead, moving automatically around the room to collect what she needs.

This isn’t her first bout of homesickness. It doesn’t even feel like that bad. She can handle this. Just power through, deal with today being bad, then enjoy everything being better tomorrow.

* * *

Half an hour later, sobbing over a bowl of porridge, she admits to herself that maybe she can’t just power through it.

She’d been _fine_ until she got to the kitchen. Not great, no, but _dealing._ Sure, she’d had to brush her teeth with her eyes closed to avoid looking in the mirror but sometimes she has to do that even when she’s _not_ homesick. It’s not like she had to turn the lights off to shower to keep her brain from screaming about the freckles on her arms and legs being wrong or anything. It could’ve been worse. And, okay, so maybe she’d felt a bit more aware than usual that half her morning routine is habits her mum instilled in her, like folding her bed back and airing her room, but that wasn’t necessarily a _bad_ thing. She’d managed to not cry since she left her bed though and that was the point.

And then she’d come downstairs to the kitchen and Castus had made porridge and all her tenuous control over her emotions slipped and _shattered._

It’s always the little things. It’s _just a bowl of porridge._ Just oats cooked in milk and sitting in a bowl. It’s not even the first time she’s had it here.

But.

But it’s also one of the first things she ever learned to cook for herself. It’s what she learned to cook from her parents and they both learned from _their_ parents and it’s what she and her friends had stupid joking arguments over because _salt or sugar?_ It’s the one breakfast food she and her siblings could always agree on and the first suggestion any one of them would make when someone moaned about not knowing what to eat in the morning. It’s simple and safe and when she was little she used to always burn her tongue trying to eat before her mum had a chance to slice troughs in it for the milk to flow through when she poured it in to cool it down-

There’s so many things that _belong_ with porridge and the only one of them here is _her._

She wants all of those things back. She wants the misty mornings and the horizons full of hills and a sky that’s grey more often than it’s blue. She wants to wake up in the same bedroom she spent most of her teenage years in, at a ridiculous hour of the morning because travelling to the next county over for university every day makes for a _terrible_ commute when you class starts at nine am, and find her mum already up to help her  and her dad get out of the door because he’s got a terrible commute for _work_ , with two thermoses already sitting on the counter, full of boiling water while a jug of milk heats in the microwave and the coffee machine works, and a bowl of porridge sitting at her seat at the table because it’s the beginning of Winter and the sun won’t be up for hours yet and _you’re going to need something that sticks to your ribs today, sweetheart-_

She wants to go _home._ She _wants her mum and dad._

She heaves a shuddering breath and scrubs at her eyes. She breathes in again, holds it, breathes out. It’s second nature, falling into this breathing exercise. For a few seconds, it almost makes it worse, because they taught this to her, they coaxed her through this when she was four and needed to calm down enough to tell them what was wrong and-

_In. Hold. Out._

She’s not okay. She’s so very not okay. But that’s okay. It’s okay for her to not be okay. She homesick and- and _grieving._

And she’s eight. Age still feels weird, will probably _always_ feel weird, she thinks, because she _was_ twenty and maybe _should_ feel twenty-eight, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t feel almost thirty; she feels twenty-and-eight. Like the adult part of her just _froze_ at some point. She thinks about it a lot, at night, staring at the ceiling. Ponders over it and makes herself laugh and cry a little when she thinks about proposing the topic of age disconnect in the event of reincarnation with retained memories to her little brother for his Philosophy class in High School. The laughter usually outdoes the tears when she imagines the faces he might’ve pulled if she’d tried to word it in the most pretentious way she could have.

She’s eight and homesick and grieving. She’s allowed to not be okay. She makes herself remember that.

She blinks.

_Oh, I’m under the table._

She vaguely remembers, at some point during the tears, shoving herself off of her chair and into shelter because everything was just _too much._ There was too much inside of her and she couldn’t stop that so she needed everything _around_ her to be _less._ There isn’t too much inside of her anymore, even though the aching grip around her heart is still there. Now it’s residing in a ribcage that feels scraped out and raw and that same empty, hollow feeling is in all the bones up and down her arms and legs, making them feel like the inside of a straw.

Those... are familiar signs.

She can see Castus and Amet’s legs through the gaps between the chairs, hears Amet panicking a little herself and Castus calming her down. The ghost of a heavy weight settles in her gut, everything still too raw and empty for a full emotion to be there, but the ghost of it is all she needs. She really thought she had it under control and now she’s gone and worried people.

_I’m allowed to not be okay_ she reminds herself, trying to chase off the guilt. It still would have been preferable to have this meltdown where nobody would’ve seen it though. Or, even better, to not have had the meltdown at all.

She scrubs her hands over her face again, then pushes a chair out of the way with her feet and crawls out.

“I’m- um, I’m okay now,” she says, looking up at them both and thinking about the fact that if she wasn’t eight, they’d be peers, to distract herself from the facts that they’re adults with a role in her care and she’s worried them “but, uh, I’m... gonna go, if that’s okay?”

The half-expectation to be told that she needs to stay and eat _something_ for breakfast barely has a chance to form before she’s faced with twin assurances that _of course_ _that’s okay, go do whatever you need to do, kiddo-_

She flees the room and _does not_ look at the bowl of porridge on her way out.

* * *

A distraction is _paramount._ She’s got homesickness and post-meltdown rawness working together to make her insides feel just... awful. She needs _anything_ to think about but that.

She has an idea.

Her brain, or soul, or _whatever_ part of her is responsible for the pained whispers of _home, home, home_ , wants her thinking about and longing for a place she can’t return to so much? Then she needs a solid reminder of why she needs to be _here._

It’s with purpose that she marches up the stairs to her bedroom, careful not to slam the door behind her, and pulls her notebooks out from under her bed. Plans upon plans upon plans, every brainstorm she’s had so far about things she can do that might make things better. _These_ are what she needs right now, a solid link and anchor to Insomnia and Lucis and _Eos_. The siren call of responsibility and _duty_ to drown out the longing. She’s the only one who knows what she knows. She has a job to do.

The room, for all that it’s _hers,_ her space, little touches of herself all over it, doesn’t help. She’s too aware that it’s her room but not _her room._ Three notebooks and accompanying pens get picked out of the collection and the rest returned to their semi-secure hiding place. Two blankets and an armful of cushions get retrieved from the pile in the corner.

She slides the doorstop into place with her foot on her way out. The room does still need properly aired. The march back downstairs has as much purpose as the one upstairs did.

There’s an under-table fort to be made and problems to work on a solution for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like the fact that my usual fic wheelhouse is Emotional Introspection Character Study Oneshots kinda shows with this chapter and I'm okay with that. Here's some Sad Aulea and establishment of some elements of her character that I feel have either been subtle or not quite present in the narrative so far!  
> This actually ended up getting so long that I had to split it in two to keep the pacing steady (at least... I hope that's what that decision accomplished) so the next chapter is almost ready to go and you should be able to expect it within the week!


	9. Chapter 9

Safely ensconced in comfortable dimness beneath the dining room table, Aulea sighs for the nth time since she woke up. It feels almost meaningless, with the empty rawness in her bones, but she does it anyways. With her legs idly kicking in the air behind her – one of the few advantages of being small again, being able to lie on her stomach and kick her legs beneath a table – and her pen clicking in her hand, she runs over the facts and calculations again.

They don’t change. Clicking her pen once more, she scores a line through her _age 15 (let’s hope!)_ note with a bit more force than necessary and writes _nope, definitely 14_ next to it. Technically, fifteen could _theoretically_ be doable but waiting until that birthday came and went would give her _way_ too narrow a window and would amplify the odds of running into the Royal Guard way too much for comfort – provided, of course, that previous deductions and assumptions are correct and they _aren’t_ a permanent presence that will be an inevitable confrontation as part of this plan regardless of her actions or timing. If she’s wrong about that part, everything goes down the drain, but it’s not like she has any way to _check,_ so that falls under the _hope for the best_ protocol.

She sticks the end of her pen between her teeth to free up both her hands and flips back a few pages to check her earlier notes, pulling the oldest of her three chosen notebooks closer to check them against the copy of the timeline from her original loose-leaf notes. _Late Nov. 721: VB releases ALC_ it continues to read, the note above it likewise continuing to read _Late Jan. 721: VB learns of ALC_. They both use her own handwriting to _mock_ her about the dates. Forty seven years to save the world, sure, but only about six or seven left on the deadline for the biggest and earliest thing she can change.

She sighs yet again and flips back to the pages she’d been working on. Another flurry of clicks as her pen transfers back from mouth to hand and she circles _July 21 – 26 M.E. 720._ As much as she would have preferred a different set of dates, there’s no denying that that one is probably her best bet. At the very least, it’s the absolute latest she can afford to push it. The dates when the Umbral Isle is accessible – provided the conversions from the old calendar that were oh-so-briefly mentioned in _Islands Across Eos_ are correct, which she has no way of verifying because she has no idea where you even start with calendar conversions, so the skill and accuracy of the referenced scholars also falls under _hope for the best_ – are infuriatingly sporadic, especially when she factors in having to work around her _age_ as well as the other timeline stuff. That it’s always a set of six days is useful but not much help when she’s stuck in Insomnia and also a child. It’s not like she can just up and go on a trip to Galdin Quay herself, not until _years_ after there’s no point.

A few further page flips and she underlines the _family holiday?_ bullet point on her list of possible methods of getting to where she needs to be. Galdin is still a tourist destination at this point, she’s pretty sure, even if places like the Mother of Pearl don’t exist yet. She’s pretty sure it doesn’t, at least. She hasn’t seen mention of it in any of the relevant books and leaflets that she’s managed to find.

She misses the internet. She _really_ misses the internet. This would be _so much easier_ with the internet. Or even if she was an adult and could just go to the _library._ Even better, if she could run the plan by her dad so he could check for obvious things she's overlooked-

No, bad Aulea, don’t think about the things you miss, that defeats the point of a distraction.

With yet another sigh, she sets her pen aside and snaps the notebook with the timeline shut. Lethargically, she flips through her notes and development of the plan, looking for _anything_ she can currently improve upon that she hasn’t already done today. She flips past lists of possible equipment, brainstormed ideas for _after_ , scribbled calculations of travel times by various travel methods, a little note-to-self to look into learning how to ride a chocobo. There’s even a few old abandoned plans from before this notebook got dedicated to just the one. She does smile when she gets towards the beginning and sees where she crossed out her _Angelgard Plan_ heading once she realised that this was something she was actually serious about. Actual plans need actual names, after all.

Still, as she already knew, there’s nothing else she can do for this one, for now.

 _Operation Guardian Angel_ is once more at a standstill.

Well, this is why she brought three notebooks. One for working on the big plan, one full of info she needs to do that, and one for when the big plan has run its course and she still needs a distraction.

It’s helped, at least. Working on ideas and getting closer and closer to a tangible change has helped. The longing for home persists but she has a _responsibility_ here and she’s going to see it through. She was never taught to do anything less.

She folds the notebook shut, slides it and the older one under a cushion together and rolls over onto her back to read through the third one she brought with her; the much newer blue-paper-with-lilac-foxes one, full of everyday problems she can work on everyday solutions to. She scoops a handful of dry cereal from the bowl next to her as she does so. It doesn’t really taste of anything but eating is, unfortunately, non-optional and the generic Insomnian brand she grabbed from the pantry that doesn’t resemble anything she had Before is about all she thinks she can stomach right now.

Ms Candida’s birthday is coming up and she still doesn’t have any ideas for a gift. She could draw something but she doesn’t know what. It’s got to be something she _makes_ because she doesn’t actually have freedom to buy things right now. Maybe she could sew something? She hasn’t been able to get near a needle-and-thread _yet_ so her skills are rusty but it’s not like this is the first time she’s taken an eight year break from that particular hobby.

There’s also that fight Tica got into with the lad a year above her at the start of the week. She was in the wrong and she knows it, she’s _said_ as much, but she’s been rubbish at apologies for as long as Aulea's known her and might need some help to make up with him...

She pauses on a page scribbled far more messily than even her usual handwriting. The memory of the emotion behind that is still relatively fresh, even moreso than Hepatica’s fight.

 _Yeah, okay, that’ll work_ she thinks, sitting up and balancing the notebook on her crossed legs, slipping the glittery gel pen she uses for it out of the ring-binding.

First things first, the limitations she needs to take into account – the variable of a very necessary co-conspiritor, the strict time limit, the need for a suitable disguise...

* * *

_Knock knock_ go someone’s knuckles against the top of the table, an indeterminate amount of time later.

She slips the pen back into the ring-binding of the notebook, eyes scanning over her writing. Her heart feels a little lighter, for all she’s still empty and raw. Operation Guardian Angel has _some_ progress made and that was grounding and securing and right now she’s looking at a pretty solid and complete plan for solving a smaller problem. She feels _better_ , even if better isn’t _fine._

“Come in!” she says, faking just enough enthusiasm to make it a chirp, if only to not worry whoever it is more than she will have today thanks to _emotions._

The blanket dividing her space beneath the table from the rest of the world, her cozy little planning cave, lifts up in front of her. Amet smiles in at her and she smiles back and it only feels a little forced and probably doesn’t look it at all. She hopes it doesn’t, at least. She’s definitely worried Amet enough today.

“Dinner is ready,” Amet says “We can leave your fort as it is but you do need to come out of it for now,”

Her heart twinges at the thought of going back out into the world _(that still doesn’t feel like hers)_ but she nods and crawls out. Her notebook ends up clutched to her chest as she stands.

“Solve any problems?” Amet asks, nodding at it, as they walk from dining room to kitchen.

Aulea almost stutters in her step. Anyone knowing what she was doing was... unexpected. She might talk a lot but she doesn’t think she’s ever talked about solving problems like she does on days like this. And Amet had been worrying about her hiding under a table during her meltdown earlier! Worrying about that but having noticed that she problem solves as a stress management tool seems inconsistent. Maybe she misunderstood the worry earlier? It wouldn’t be the first time someone else’s emotions went straight over her head-

Maybe she’s overthinking this, just a little.

“Yeah,” she says instead, hoping she gets enough energy in her voice “Nightlight’s dad’s never let him go to the park before but I think I’ve figured out a way so that he can go,”

“He’s _never_ let him go?” Amet asks, with the tone of one engaging a child on a topic of their choice. Aulea doesn’t much care; if Amet is going to act like the meltdown didn’t happen, that’s fine by her. For now, she doesn’t even mind being talked to like the child she’s not. Sometimes, it’s just easier to slip into the role of the child expected of her, as much as she could never convincingly be anyone’s definition of a _normal_ one.

She hadn’t been able to successfully fake being a ‘normal’ child even when she’d actually _been_ a child. Normal as a concept is overrated.

“Never _ever,”_ she confirms, hoping it sounds like childish indignation and not genuine anger. Forget the park, he's never let him go _anywhere._ Neither of them have said it outright but he's dropped more than enough hints lately, deliberately and not, for her to have figured out that he isn't actually _allowed_ to leave the house, not even with someone older with him. Between that and the sheer number of tutors he's mentioned, the fact that Nightlight has _any_ free time, let alone enough to sneak out semi-consistently, is probably some kind of miracle.  
The (admittedly more recent than she would like) realisation of that last part led to two things; very messy handwriting about the topic of conversation that finally made the penny drop, and a decision to enable him in this as much as she can.  
_Overprotective_ is Nightlight's adjective of choice. The kindest one Aulea has is _stifling._ There's a difference between trying to protect your kid and socially isolating them and as far as she knows, she's the only kid his age that Nightlight knows. There's something very wrong with that situation, as far as she's concerned.

She has _words_ for Nightlight’s dad, if she ever meets him, and never misses her adulthood as keenly as she does when she imagines delivering those words. A death glare coming from a child really only works on other children.

(She has a lot of opinions about parenting for someone who has never been or wanted to be one. Older sister habits die hard, that's her story and she's sticking to it)

Amet hums in acknowledgement, blissfully unaware of the tangent her charge's mind has barreled down. It's an invitation to keep talking but not precisely engagement. Aulea is oddly glad of that. She might be starting to actually _feel_ her emotions under her skin again but actual conversation is still a distant question mark. Silence would be worse though, so she lets herself slip into babbling. Mindless words slip forth with little effort, as easy as walking, and it’s just a little extra bit grounding. She keeps going as they walk and then as they sit at the table, her and Amet and Castus and Ms Candida. If it’s just them, everyone else has either already eaten or is going to eat later. Except it was just Amet and Castus that morning, so maybe everybody else has the weekend off. At least she’s not on her own in the dining room again. It's too quiet and she doesn't like eating alone. Food is meant to be shared.

The meal is something she's never had before and doesn't even remotely resemble anything her mum ever made, which, after the porridge debacle, is a gift horse she is _not_ going to look in the mouth. She picks out the bits she doesn't like without comment - kidney beans, _blech_ \- and keeps up the stream of babble she started in the hallway with Amet.

She babbles, about Nightlight and how he’s never even been on the swings even though they’re the same age, about how strict it seems like his dad is, not letting him go to the park and not letting him have a swing set at home instead, and from there shifts the topic to parks and swings and Tica's ongoing efforts to swing high enough to go over the top bar, and from there to physics because _it's actually impossible to do that, did you know?_ Just... lets the words fall out because it’s so much easier than actually thinking.

She babbles and she hopes that next time she wakes up, the aching weight in her bones will be quiet enough to be almost unnoticeable again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We are getting close to some of the parts of my outline that I've mentally labelled as The Really Fun Stuff and I am looking forwards to getting there very much but for now here's some more Sad Aulea and hints at future plot :3c


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I've moved since I last updated! That was a thing! And my classes start in a week so updates may or may not slow down depending on how that goes (though they... aren't very fast in the first place... XP)
> 
> But, for now, here's this!! Enjoy! :D

It takes longer than usual for the ache to fully fade. She tells herself that that’s fine, that’s how grief works sometimes, and keeps focusing on other things so that it will _keep_ fading. She polishes up her plan for taking Nightlight to the park, does some sketching, and watches a lot of Li’l Malbuddy – it’s a bizarre sort of comfort, the way the formula reminds her just enough of cartoons she watched when she was really young to be a grounding familiarity but the rest of the show is different enough that it doesn’t make the homesickness worse.

By the time she finally feels normal again, the space the ache took up is filled with a different emotion.

* * *

It is _endlessly_ frustrating to not be able to put a plan into motion.

At first, it’s just inconvenient timing – the next Tuesday after she has it all figured out, Nightlight doesn’t make it to their meet up spot. She waits extra long just to make sure but even if he _had_ eventually arrived, it would’ve been too late to put the plan into motion.

Then, she makes the mistake of showing the plan to Hepatica when she meets up with her at lunchtime the next day and she immediately points out flaws in some of her logic and the plan needs reworked. Some of it is really basic stuff too and Aulea decides she’s going to blame that on when she made it.

When she and Nightlight meet up the week after that, she hasn’t finished ironing out those issues yet – between classes with Moliri and tagging along on shopping trips and the time she’s set aside for research, she hasn’t really worked on it as much as she could have – and she doesn’t say a word about it to him. She can’t think of anything that would be worse than the look on his face if she got his hopes up about this and then couldn’t follow through. So she just brings as many new comics as she can and settles for that making him smile.

After that, little things just keep on interfering and sometimes even when she sits down to try and dedicate time to figuring it out, her brain just won’t _co-operate,_ and before she knows it, it’s been a few months.

* * *

“Aulea, no,” Hepatica says, voice flat. She doesn’t even deign to look up from her history textbook as she pushes the sheets of paper back across the table.

“Aulea, _yes,”_ she counters, shoving them back towards her “Just _read it,_ Tica! I promise it’s simpler than the last one I showed you,”

“That means very little, coming from you,”

 _“Rude,”_ Aulea gasps, flinging a hand over her heart theatrically. A few other students scattered around the library shoot her annoyed looks and she sheepishly hunches down over the table a little. The librarians don’t seem to have noticed her yet, though, so there’s that.

“Nah, just the truth,” Hepatica says, sliding the paper away again.

Aulea pushes them back, right up against the top of the textbook, then keeps sliding her hand until it’s covering the page Hepatica is reading, fingers splayed. It’s an ineffective strategy; she just picks it up and drops it on the table. Aulea retaliates by immediately replacing it with her other hand. They cycle through the sequence a few more times and then Hepatica’s shoulders slump and she looks up. Aulea grins at her, pretending that leaning across to give her a taste of her own medicine isn’t resulting in the edge of the table digging less-than-comfortably into her spleen.

Hepatica _sighs_ , the perfect picture of a put upon older sister, and Aulea’s grin widens. Now she understands why her younger siblings always seemed to put so much effort into putting that exact same expression on _her_ face, Before.

 _“Pay attention to me,”_ she whispers exaggeratedly, attempting to pout and ruining it by not being able to stop smiling.

Hepatica rolls her eyes.

“And by ‘you’, you mean ‘your plotting’,” she says.

“I don’t _plot,”_ Aulea says, slipping back into the plastic chair and scuffing her feet against the carpet.

Hepatica raises an eyebrow and it’s utterly unfair that a _thirteen year old_ can so clearly convey that much disbelief with just a facial expression when everyone else is still so hard to read.

“And yet,” she says, closing her textbook over and leaning just slightly forwards to whisper “you’re _here._ Even though this is a study period and you’re not supposed to be here until lunch. How did you even get in?”

Aulea shrugs.

“I walked in the door like everyone else?”

“You’re _eight._ There’s no way anyone bought that you’re a student here. You’re not even in uniform,”

“Nobody’s questioned me,”

“You’re _kidding,”_

Another shrug and a vague gesture around the library.

“I literally just walked in the front door and up here. I honestly thought it would be harder,”

Hepatica throws her head back, covering her face with her hands and groaning. She mumbles something that Aulea thinks might have been _‘this school needs better security.’_ She’s not entirely wrong.

Aulea leans across again and tries to _there, there_ her. The closest she gets is brushing her fingertips across the sleeve of her blazer. _Curse you, tiny child arms_ she whispers internally.

“You’d be amazed what people let you get away with if you just act like you belong and you know what you’re doing,” she says, in lieu of any words of comfort.

Hepatica looks at her through her fingers, the shadows they cast making the amber look a darker shade than usual.

“You’re the scariest eight year old I know,” she says.

“I’m the _only_ eight year old you know, you left all the others behind in elementary school,”

Hepatica sighs again and drags her hands down her face. There’s almost a smile on her face when she leans back forwards.

“Why are you here so early?” she asks “You usually have your...” she makes a vague hand gesture “ _...thing_ about rules,”

Aulea wordlessly taps the sheets of paper she’s been pushing at her for the past ten minutes. Hepatica looks between them and her, then closes her eyes for a long moment.

“Why is this one so important to you? Why couldn’t it wait?” she asks.

“I’ve spent most of the morning so far arguing with Moliri over fractional equations and it ended with both of us in tears,” Aulea deadpans “Let me have this,”

“What _is_ it with you and fractions?”

 _Five maths teachers and an aeronautical engineer have tried and failed to make them make sense and I thought I was done with having to deal with them_ Aulea almost wants to say.

Instead, she does her best attempt at puppy dog eyes.

Hepatica picks up the papers and starts reading.

* * *

Aulea’s leg is bouncing so fast that she’s only barely managing to not shake the table by the time Hepatica is done.

“Well?” she asks, hoping she doesn’t look nervous.

“Well, it _is_ simpler than your last park-related plot,” Hepatica says. There’s a beat of silence and she doesn’t elaborate further.

Aulea whines.

“That’s all?” she asks.

Hepatica drums her fingers against the table and hums noncommittally.

“I still don’t understand why you don’t just, like, _make_ a swing for him or something. There’s tons of trees around where you meet, right?”

“Because that doesn’t solve the problem!” Aulea replies, flinging her hands in the air. There’s a scattered rush of shushing through the library. Volume lowered and face flushed, she continues “Swings are great, yeah, but parks have more than that – there’s slides and climbing frames and...”

She trails off and looks down, bunching her hands in her skirt.

“...and other kids,” she finishes, sucking one cheek between her teeth.

That’s the crux of it, really. Other kids. The chance for him to be around other people, maybe even make other friends. A taste of freedom and normality that he doesn’t seem to get much of but also...

Everything she knows about his life at home – which most days feels so very, very little – makes it seem so _lonely._

She remembers being lonely. She remembers desperately trying to make even one friend and never being able to figure out what she was doing _wrong._ She remembers being quiet and alone and spending every break and lunchtime hiding in a corner of the playground with a book because escape into fiction was better than being the weird kid everybody went out of their way to avoid. She remembers all of that, at the age he is now, and how long it took to recover from it as she grew up.

It’s bad. It’s bad and it hurts and he’s her friend and she wants to _help._ Nobody should be that kind of lonely. She’s not letting that happen. Not if she can _do something._

There’s a hand on her shoulder. Because _of course_ Hepatica is tall enough to be able to lean over the table and do that properly.

There are also, she realises, some tears on her cheeks.

She scrubs them away.

“He’s lonely, Tica,” she says, very quietly, staring down at her lap and tightening her hold on the fabric of her skirt “and I can’t do anything about his dad but maybe I can do this,”

There’s the _shuff_ of plastic chair legs against carpet and then arms wrapped tightly around her. She melts into the comfort of the pressure, eyes slipping closed.

“You’re too grown up for your own good sometimes, Lea,” Hepatica murmurs into her shoulder.

Aulea laughs a little, bites back the _you have no idea_ that rests behind her teeth, and instead says:

“Does this mean you’ll help?”

Hepatica does the exasperated older sister sigh again and then nods. Aulea can only tell she’s doing that from inside the hug because of how her chin bumps against her.

“Yeah, sure, okay,” she says, releasing the hug to instead put both hands on her shoulders and look her in the eyes – Aulea lasts two whole seconds before diverting her gaze to the bridge of her nose “I’ll help with your ridiculous scheme,”

“It’s not ridiculous,”

“Kinda is,”

“Is _not,”_

“Is _too,”_

The end-of-period bell rings and the only thing that keeps Aulea from startling right off the chair is Hepatica’s grip on her shoulders. She gives her a small smile and then pulls her hands away to stand up. The room is filled with the sounds of standing and chatter and packing books and jotters into bags. Hepatica steps back around the table to pack up her stuff. Aulea picks up her sheets of paper and folds them back over to slip into her hoodie pocket.

“I’m looking forwards to finally _meeting_ the kid you can’t shut up about,” Hepatica says, hefting her rucksack onto her back “I hope you haven’t been telling him anything _too_ terrible about me,”

“I’ve told him that you’re the absolute best, Tica,” Aulea says, grinning.

Hepatica clicks her tongue and reaches over to ruffle Aulea’s hair.

“No, you haven’t,” she says, grinning an equal amount “but that’s fine. I’ll settle for him knowing my name,”

Aulea pretends to look thoughtful, eyes towards the ceiling, hand on her chin.

“...no guarantees,” she says.

Hepatica mock-swipes at her like she intends to knock her upside the head. Aulea dodges with a laugh and darts into the throng of students leaving the library.

“Don’t get yourself caught on the way out!” comes the call from behind her.

“I won’t!” she replies.

* * *

She doesn’t get caught. Slipping back out of the school is as easy as slipping in was. All she has to do is wait until the receptionist isn’t looking and she can just walk across the reception and out the front door as easily and confidently as though she’s meant to be there and doing that.

Pretending she belongs is a trick she has gotten _very_ good at, if she does say so herself.

Once that’s done and she’s far enough down the road that it feels safe, she glances back over her shoulder and can’t help the satisfied grin. That, she thinks, qualifies as a successful stealth mission. She can all but hear the younger version of herself that tried to slink around family gatherings with a walkie-talkie cheering.

One hand slips into her hoodie pocket to hold onto the paper with the finalised version of her plan and the other swings at her side. She all but skips her way home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realised in the course of writing this chapter that these early days in Insomnia are probably gonna be quite episodic, with minor slice-of-life-y plot arcs over a few chapters, and once I figured _that_ out it became so much easier to get stuff written. Things will pick up eventually but for now, things are being set up :3c I have to say, setting up things that are going to be bigger down the line and dropping hints about character traits is very fun, so I hope you're all enjoying reading this as much as I am writing it!


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _  
>  **I LIIIIIIIIIIIVE**   
>  _
> 
> Merry Christmas! I'm sorry you've all had to wait so long for this chapter, I've had a _packed_ semester (two modules with live clients!) and far less time to write than I would have liked. I'm hoping I'll be able to build up something of a buffer over the holidays, so I can keep posting when next semester starts, but we'll just have to wait and see if that works out
> 
> You may have noticed that I've adjusted the tags - characters I thought would show up fairly quickly have ended up taking longer than anticipated and characters I didn't expect have ended up important, so they needed shifted around. I'm going to stick to only tagging characters once they actually show up from here on, to make it fair on people searching the character tags!
> 
> So, that said... here you go! Hope it was worth the wait! And hopefully, you won't have to wait nearly as long for the next one!

Aulea wouldn’t be able to stop herself bouncing even if she wanted to.

She bounds into their meeting spot, swings her bulging rucksack up onto the log, and waits. She tries sitting for all of a few seconds before giving up and giving in to the need to rock up-down-up-down on the balls of her feet. She twists side to side, scanning the trees as she goes.

The moment she sees movement, she _moves,_ darting over to Nightlight’s side.

“Hi, how much time do you have today?” she blurts, the words blurring together.

He startles and stumbles a few steps back. She winces. Oops.

“Uh,” he says, blinking at her “An hour and a half?”

She squeaks in excitement.

“Perfect!” she says, grabbing his hand and pulling him over to the log.

“Aulea?” he says, something in his voice that she can’t quite place. Confusion, maybe? “You’re being weird,”

“I’m always weird,” she replies automatically. He makes a sound of protest but her attention has already shifted, dropping his hand in favour of pulling her rucksack off the log. With a flourish and a grin, she pulls a sequined cape free in one hand and a foam visor in the other, then twirls to show them off “Ta-da!”

Nightlight looks between them and her.

“Aulea,” he says, sounding almost plaintive “I _do not understand_ what is currently happening,”

She sweeps the cape around his shoulders and fastens the velcro, then ruffles his hair, her grin widening.

“I’m taking you to the _park,”_ she says.

* * *

For all of Hepatica’s teasing, Aulea’s plan _is_ actually pretty simple. At least, she thinks so. She can admit that it took a few iterations to get there (though the very earliest draft is by far the simplest, with three steps comprising _1\. Take Nightlight to the park 2. ??? 3. Profit_ because it was a hard day and she needed the laugh before she turned it into something serious) but she’s _sure_ that as it is now, it doesn’t have any unnecessary steps.

It goes like this:

There’s a large-ish public play park a ten minute brisk walk from their spot by the log, provided that one exits the wooded area from the opposite side that Aulea usually enters it from. This is good because their time is limited, so they can’t afford to go far.

Nightlight isn’t supposed to be out of the house and would get in big trouble if anyone he knows saw him, which makes him scared of going anywhere with people. (He hasn’t told her as much in as many words but he doesn’t exactly make it _difficult_ to put the pieces together). Therefore, he needs to be unrecognisable, but in an easily reversible way. Aulea’s answer to this is dress-up costumes. With the right one, keeping his clothes and face hidden is simple.

With _that_ solution, however, comes a secondary problem – a young child out playing in costume with no supervision could draw concerned eyes. More attention means more potential risk of recognition.

 _Two_ kids in costume, though? That would draw less attention. Two together is less worrying than one alone.

And two kids in costume, at a play park, accompanied by an older kid?

That’s as good as invisibility.

(She’s _so glad_ Hepatica agreed to help)

She talks Nightlight through it as she pulls out the costumes she shoved into her rucksack and they pull them on. Hers is the faster of the two, really only being a hooded poncho, a belt, and a pair of gloves with plastic talons, combined with the fact that apparently she is the one of them that knows how dress-up costumes _work._ He catches on quickly but she does have to explain that _it just goes on over your clothes, Nightlight, you don't need to take your shirt off to put the tunic on_.

For all that his costume has double the parts of hers, it’s still just a kids’ dress up costume and they make quick work of it together, with her fastening the velcro for the visor and the helmet while he pulls on the gauntlets. Even the delay of having to take the cape off so he can put the tunic on before putting the cape back on barely causes a dent in their timing.

A fairy tale knight and a chocobo are standing amongst the trees before she’s even finished her explanation.

“How long have you been _planning_ this?” Nightlight asks as she leads him through the trees to where Hepatica is waiting.

“Months,” she admits “I didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to get your hopes up if I couldn’t figure out a viable plan,”

There’s a beat of silence. The grip of the hand in hers tightens.

 _“Aulea,”_ Nightlight says, voice choked and his eyes – the only part of his face visible behind the foam visor – shimmering.

“Please don’t cry! I don’t know how to handle happy tears and I don’t have anything for you to drink with me today!”

* * *

When they finally step from dirt to pavement, having to clamber over a fence in the process, Hepatica is leaning against a wall and waiting. With her arms folded across her chest and one foot propped up against the wall, she’s a picture-perfect _cool teenager_ , for all that she’s wearing dungarees and is only a few months into being thirteen.

She spots them immediately – it would be hard not to, between the bright chocobo-yellow feathers and all of the sequins on the ‘armour’.

“Finally!” she says, giving them a lopsided grin “I was beginning to wonder if we’d have to wait for another day!”

“Nope! Today’s the day!” Aulea chirps, retaking Nightlight’s hand as he hops down from the fence and bounding closer to her friend.

She jerks to a stop mid-bounce with a surprised _hrnk_ as her arm goes taut.

A quick glance over her shoulder reveals the cause. Nightlight has frozen in his tracks, his grip on her hand gone vice-like. His eyes have gone wide and she has a feeling that whatever his expression is behind the visor, it’s not anything good.

_Uh-oh._

It occurs to her, noticing the slight tremble to his shoulders, that she’s really never seen him around other people. What if her conclusion about why that was was wrong? What if he isn’t worried about getting in trouble at all, what if he’s just _shy?_ But if he was, wouldn’t he have said something before now? He would have corrected her on her assumption when she mentioned it earlier, wouldn’t he? Does he not want to do this at all but he just didn’t feel like he could say no to her-

“Nightlight?” she says, not sure what she’s trying to ask.

His eyes dart from her to Hepatica and back again. She still isn’t sure what his body language is saying but a quick glance over her shoulder tells her that whatever it is, Hepatica has caught on.

“Hey,” she says, voice soft the way she used to use for calming down grade ones when they tripped and skinned their knees. She pulls her hands out of her dungaree pockets and crouches down “Easy there, kiddo, I don’t bite,”

His eyes are _locked_ on her, following every movement, but his grip on Aulea’s hand lessens slightly, his shoulders go a little looser.

 _Something_ is going on here and Aulea can’t tell _what._ She wants to do something to help, wants to reassure him, _it’s okay, it’s just Tica, I told you she’d be here,_ but she doesn’t know what’s wrong in the first place and doesn’t want to make things worse.

“You’re Nox, right?” Hepatica goes on, hands hanging loosely with her elbows resting on her thighs “Lea’s told me all about you. Has she told you anything about me?”

“...yeah,” he says, voice quiet enough that the visor could almost block it.

Tica nods. If she were a bit older, Aulea would describe the movement as _sagely._

“I’m guessing she left a few details out, huh?” Hepatica says, tilting her head slightly and smiling wryly.

_Wait, what?_

“Wait, what?” Aulea says, glancing between them, thoroughly lost.

Hepatica gives her a Look.

“Aulea,” she says, voice long-suffering “I’m _tall,”_

“...so?”

Aulea is able to identify the expression that Hepatica sends Nightlight’s way solely by virtue of having seen it many times over two lifetimes – _do you see what I’m dealing with here?_

Nightlight _giggles,_ the traitor. He seems far more at ease now, which she’s glad of, but she’s still so _lost._ It’s been a while since she’s been _this_ lost in a social situation and she _does not like it._

Nonetheless, he does take a few steps forward so that they’re standing side by side. Hepatica smiles, brushes off her legs – even though there’s no dirt on them – and slowly stands up. Aulea feels his grip on her hand tighten again for a few moments, then release.

“Okay then, kiddos! Time’s a’wasting! Let’s get you two to the park!” Hepatica announces in a faux-jovial voice, planting her hands on her hips. The grin on her face gives away that she knows _exactly_ what she’s doing.

Nightlight laughs outright at the deadpan look Aulea shoots her in response. It’s a far cry and a fast turnaround from how frozen he was just moments before. Sometimes, Aulea is _really_ glad for Hepatica’s gift with people.

* * *

Their pace is brisk – it has to be – and before long, they can hear the sounds of screams and laughter in the air. It’s a relatively quiet walk, partially because they’re all moving just short of a jog, partially because Nightlight is looking around at _everything_ with wide eyes and Aulea’s pretty sure that neither she nor Hepatica can think of anything to talk about that would be worth pulling his attention away from that. Well, that and she’s still mentally going over what happened, trying to place what exactly _was_ happening.

As they get closer to the park, Hepatica glances down at her.

“You’re still trying to figure out what you missed earlier, aren’t you?” she asks.

Aulea glances up and wonders, not for the first time, if she can read minds – there’s enough weirdness in this world that she wouldn’t bat an eye at it – and shrugs an assent.

Hepatica smiles, a fond one, not a teasing one, and opens her mouth.

“Most are inclined towards finding strangers tall enough to sling you over their shoulders _a little intimating,_ Aulea,”

Hepatica’s mouth clicks shut. She hasn't said a word. They both wheel around.

There’s a twinkle in Nightlight’s eyes and that... that is the first joke like that she’s _ever_ heard him say. That is the _driest_ humour she’s ever heard from him. He laughs at her jokes but she so _rarely_ hears him make any of his own, let alone one so... _unguarded._

 Something swells in her chest and warmth tingles under her skin along her shoulders and down her arms; she thinks it might be a mixture of happiness and pride.

Well, far be it from her to not play into the joke.

She gasps dramatically, throwing a hand over her heart.

“Betrayal!” she declares, miming a swoon with her other hand “My two closest allies teaming up against me! How could you!”

“It’s not our fault you make it so easy,” Hepatica says, throwing a grin Nightlight’s way and holding up a hand.

Judging by the way the corners of his eyes are crinkling and the way he eagerly returns the high-five, the grin is probably being returned.

“I am _alone_ in this _world!”_

Nightlight laughs so hard it turns into a giggling snort and it’s one of the best sounds Aulea has ever, _ever_ heard.


End file.
